


Hephaestus

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Disabled Character, M/M, Metalsmithing, Past Relationship(s), Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 03:03:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Harry returned from torture at the hands of former Death Eaters horribly scarred, his lover, Draco Malfoy, rejected him in revulsion. But since then, Harry has survived and prospered—and Draco has another chance to learn that more things beyond beauty matter when he hires Harry to protect his estate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beauty in the Bed

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for issues of disfigurement and disability, violence, references to torture, angst, and Draco being a little shit. Scorpius is also OOC and too mature for his age, but there is an explanation later in the story as to why.
> 
> This story is gratefully dedicated to tray_la_la, whose generous donation to livelongnmarry is the reason this fic exists. She asked for powerful!Harry and bottom!Draco, without any major squicks. The reference in the title is to the Greek smith god Hephaestus, who was lame due to being hurled from heaven by Hera. As far as I know, the craft of metal-dancing is something I made up and unique to this story.

  
The clangor and heat of the small shed made Draco pause for long moments before he entered it, but in the end he put up his chin and did it anyway. The sooner he went through this unpleasant meeting and got it off his mind, the better.  
  
He stepped into the smoke billowing from the shed, and then had to put his hand over his mouth and cough. He hadn’t anticipated how much noise and stink even a small smithy would make, and he despaired of being heard over the clash of metal, hammers rising and falling. A misshapen figure darted past him and vanished into a cloud of soot. Draco started, then relaxed slightly. Of course. The Metal-dancers, as they called themselves, had hired dwarves to help with the work of forging the metal they needed.  
  
Draco could deal with the ugliness of dwarves, their squat bodies and squinting eyes and vulgar language. It was someone more hideous he’d come to see. He lifted his chin even higher, in the hopes of avoiding the gazes of the other dwarves that might scurry past him, and marched on.  
  
More smoke, more darting, radiant flames, more dwarves. The shed obviously had some wizardspace in it that Draco hadn’t sensed from the outside, as he should have had time to cross and re-cross the tiny building three times now. He wondered if he was heading the right direction, and if it wouldn’t be wiser to retreat and wait for later.  
  
The relief that filled him at the thought made him swallow, then cough. No, he would never return if he waited. On he marched.  
  
And then he froze, because exquisitely pure, powerful magic had struck him like a lance of sunlight. He’d never felt anything so focused. Usually, wizards like Voldemort, who had magic that leaked out of them and informed their aura, cast it in every direction, too involved in controlling the extra power behind their spells to bother with finesse.  
  
But this magic stabbed through Draco and fetched a heavy hammer lying under an anvil, then sped past him again, obedient as a sheepdog to its master’s whims, and grabbed a bucket of water. Draco squinted ahead as steam arose from the pouring of the bucket of water, and then the voice he remembered and revered and reviled said, “Thank you, Grishnazk! I think that’s all the copper I need.”  
  
 _No help for it_. Draco went forwards like a soldier going into battle.  
  
The man he had come to confront stood in front of a pile of glittering strips, his head bent and his hands moving. Draco couldn’t see what he was doing. He told himself he didn’t care. He had come to get this finished, not to watch him do his job. What Malfoy would spend time watching hired laborers?  
  
The dwarf at his side said, in the high, whinging voices that Draco had been sure they had, “And is that enough gold for you?”  
  
The voice Draco remembered laughed. Listening to it, Draco thought bitterly, you would never reckon what he looked like. “I’m not using gold to protect this place! The idea is to keep the enemies out, not invite them in.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. _Does he think golden decorations would draw thieves in? Perhaps I ought to remind him that Malfoys protect their possessions well—when they want to._  
  
He took a step forwards, but then froze as the figure in front of him backed up and waved his wand. What emerged from his mouth was no incantation, Latin or English. A high, shrill, sweet singing instead, it reminded Draco of the spell that Professor Snape had used to repair the _Sectumsempra_ wound inflicted on him by the man in front of him.  
  
 _Potter_. The voice that snarled in his head sounded like his old teacher. _You can say the name. He is not the Dark Lord, that you owe him fear or awe._  
  
Draco lifted his head again and told himself that he could watch a _bit_ of metal-dancing. He had hired Potter’s men for the supposed excellence of their craft; he wouldn’t be a Malfoy if he didn’t check the product before he bought it, after all.  
  
The shimmering strips of metal rose from the ground, following the motions of Potter’s wand. He was bobbing his head now, as if he enjoyed the sounds that emerged from his own mouth. Draco was grateful he hadn’t turned yet, and not only because he had no desire for Potter to see him standing there.   
  
The craft had a reputation for beauty, and Draco could see where it gained it. The copper strips, barely wider or thicker than wires, twined around one another like lazy snakes, and shrugged nonexistent shoulders as they rose higher and higher. Now and then two ends linked together, and a spark of gold fused them. Of course, Draco didn’t think there was cause for Potter to bob his head like someone conducting an orchestra. Draco could have cast spells that would have levitated copper and fused it in the same way. He could perhaps even have done it nonverbally, and sung whilst doing it.  
  
And then Potter flung his wand away, and extended his hands.  
  
The strips of metal continued to rise, linking more often now, and passing through one another as though they were made of brown smoke. Draco blinked and gaped. Potter rotated his wrists, his voice rising to a high-pitched croon, and the copper rolled into an enormous circle like a serpent biting its own tail.  
  
Potter took another step back, his head tilted to the side so that he could watch all the copper at once. A faint smile tugged at his lips. Draco looked quickly away before he caught more than a glimpse of gray, although he knew that the lips and eyes of his nemesis were perfect. God knew he had tried hard enough to live with Potter based on the promise of those lips and eyes.  
  
Potter tapped one finger against the heel of his palm, and his voice descended to an eerie, commanding hum. The ball of copper broke apart, and the strands began to shine with a gold-white light that Draco found as unbearable as trying to look at the sun without a charm protecting his eyes. He glanced at the ground and watched the coiling shadows. They were forming loops on the top and bottom of the figure, and Draco gathered the wherewithal to sneer. He had hired a company that was famous all over wizarding Britain, and they were going to protect his estate by making the metal into an infinity sign?  
  
But the loops gathered other loops within them, fringed themselves with delicate petals, and expanded in a way that Draco didn’t think was possible, given the amount of copper in the original strands. Perhaps Potter had broken it apart or thinned it. Any magic seemed possible given how strange and insistent the thumping rhythm of Potter’s music was, to which he had joined something that sounded like the stamping of one foot. His voice never faltered or slowed down, and never repeated a note.  
  
 _He’s not a good singer_ , Draco thought, trying to call up old memories as a defense against his awe. _I remember that much. I know he was never a good singer, and he can’t fool me into thinking he was._  
  
Another shaft of pure magic struck past his body and left his mouth gaping again. An almost apologetic thought slinked behind the magic. _Maybe he doesn’t need to be a good singer when he has that much power behind the sound._  
  
Now Potter, or maybe someone else, was warbling like a skylark, and the shadows of the copper had become a pattern that Draco’s eye lost almost the moment he attempted to trace it. And it was still budding new signs, loops, half-melted shapes that resembled birds in flight and collapsed and dripping coils that were perhaps horses or unicorns. And then all resemblance to living forms was gone, and Draco found himself gazing straight into the heart of the pattern.   
  
_Repulsion_ struck him, a force so strong that his feet left the ground for a moment. He caught the wall of the shed and kept from being blown further back by a wind he could neither hear nor feel. The sight of the pattern still blazed in his mental eyes, and it occurred to him, dimly, that it was his own mind and magic that were acting against him, trying to push him away and further away.  
  
“Oh, sorry about that,” said Potter, his voice much calmer and more polite than Draco remembered it. Of course, the last time he’d heard it, it had been screaming at him, so it made sense that the slightest change would be an improvement. Draco staggered up, batting away Potter’s outstretched hand.  
  
When he looked again, the same green eyes he remembered were regarding him from that ruin of a face.  
  
“Hullo, Malfoy.”  
  
Draco wished he stood a chance of sounding as unaffected as Potter, but he knew he didn’t. His glance slid reluctantly over the chipped gray ridges and folds around Potter’s eyes and mouth that had once been skin; only because they _had_ the eyes and lips and were bounded by crisp black hair and two ears could Draco think of them as a face. Normal people didn’t look as if their faces were made of solidified volcanic ash.  
  
And even more normal people would have had the courtesy to cover their faces with a glamour, both visual and tactile. Draco could have stayed with Potter if he’d done that. But Potter, from the very day he’d left St. Mungo’s after recovering from the magical torture at the hands of former Death Eaters, had insisted that this was what he looked like now and he was going to be honest about it.   
  
_He cared more about his honesty than about me_ , Draco thought, his bitterness bubbling up again. _He would have done anything I asked if he really wanted to keep me, since I was doing him such a favor by staying with him._  
  
“Potter,” he said, and if his voice wasn’t as cool as he would have liked, at least it made the slowly forming smile vanish off Potter’s face. “I came to see how the work was proceeding, and of course you nearly killed me.”  
  
“I’m sorry about that.” Potter cast a glance back at the hovering figure of copper. Draco looked at it under his eyelashes; no way in the world would he look at it directly, now that he knew what it did. “The new patterns are usually the most powerful, and I didn’t know anyone was nearby.”  
  
He sounded—still calm. Not frantically apologetic as he once would have been at the _thought_ of causing Draco harm, and not defensive the way he had sounded when he insisted it was his choice to go into public looking like a monster. Draco clenched his hands into fists until he felt the comforting sensation of his nails drawing blood from his palms.  
  
“You don’t mean to do a lot of things, but they still happen,” he snapped.  
  
Potter raised his eyebrows. He had a touch of genuine sorrow in his face now, but it still wasn’t the soul-ripping emotion Draco wanted to see. For God’s sake, he was meeting Potter for the first time in three years, and in a professional context, and he still couldn’t cling to the masks he’d spent those years perfecting. Why was Potter, who’d always been a poor actor, doing better than he was?  
  
“Yes, they do,” Potter said. “Of course, the craft of metal-dancing aims to increase the proportion of deliberate deeds and decrease the proportion of unintended ones.” He turned his back on Draco, as if he had finally decided that Draco needed some time to recover from the shock of seeing Potter’s ugly face again, and limped over to the copper pattern. Draco’s eyes followed the motion with a fascination that even he knew was sick. Potter limped because so many scars covered his back and the upper parts of his arse that it cramped and crippled the muscles of his right leg.   
  
_So ugly_. Draco could conceive of himself surviving such a thing, though the temptation to die of shame would have been strong; what he couldn’t understand was not covering it with glamours or not going to St. Mungo’s and badgering the Healers until they came up with a cure. Potter claimed that he wasn’t ashamed and that the Healers had said they could do nothing further. Draco didn’t believe that. For the Boy-Who-Lived, they would have found a solution. They _should_ have found one. It was Harry’s fault for not trying hard enough.  
  
And of course Draco hadn’t had any choice but to leave him and temporarily marry Astoria Greengrass, because he needed beautiful children, and he needed the solace of beauty next to him in bed after the horror of the one time he and Harry had made love when he was scarred.  
  
The marriage with Astoria had been a business arrangement, providing a Malfoy heir for him and the experience of being a mother, as well as numerous Galleons, for her; Astoria had wanted to see what it was like. They were separated now, and Scorpius was growing up in Draco’s new estate and Malfoy Manor combined, raised by a loving father and doting grandparents, far away from the horrors that had wrecked Potter’s life and Draco’s happiness.   
  
But it _could_ have been Potter, if he had only tried harder.  
  
Draco abruptly couldn’t take it anymore. He’d seen for himself that Potter’s magic worked, and he had no reason to stay here. He whipped around and strode towards the entrance of the shed.  
  
“Contact me again when you’re ready to be paid,” he said. “Or better, send one of your minions. They—“ And he clamped his teeth on the words, because he would _not_ allow Potter to hear how unnerved he was, even now.  
  
It was wonderful to step back into the clean air and gaze on green, living trees, the color they were supposed to be, and feel the sunlight pouring over his own fair skin.  
  
*  
  
Harry shook his head and leaned for a moment on the wall, watching absently as Grishnazk began hammering and heating silver on the forge, in preparation for creating the thin strips that Harry would use to create another protective sigil. The copper one hung quietly on the wall now, reminding Harry of a hooded figure standing with its head hanging towards the ground and its arms folded. It would have no more power until Harry filled it with his own magic and hung it in the air outside Draco’s estate.  
  
 _Draco_. Even now, so hard to excise the name from his head.  
  
Harry rolled a shoulder and felt his lips pulling into the quiet smile that had, finally, replaced the bitter grimace as his most frequent expression after three years of working at it. He’d had to struggle during those three years to accept what had happened to him instead of resenting it and resenting everyone around him, those people who still had whole faces and who walked without stabbing flares of pain through the scars, and the insistent pulling, as if his leg were always attached to heavy ropes. He’d had to work even harder to get used to the looks of horrified pity directed his way.  
  
If he hadn’t had Ginny, who had been captured at the same time and gone through some of the same torture, and Ron and Hermione, and a talent for metal-dancing, Harry doubted he would have survived.  
  
And put like that, it did sound silly. His survival hadn’t hinged on just one person, or on his art. Many, many things had helped him. Harry resolutely straightened his spine, as much as he could with the fried skin that connected the base of his spine to his arse. He had come far in his life, and participated in the creation of a new craft. He doubted there were many people, even Malfoy, who could say the same.  
  
“Ready in a few minutes,” Grishnazk said without glancing up. His hands flew marvelously over the hammer and the fire and the anvil. Harry tried to follow the movements with his eyes, but the dwarf was too skilled a craftsman to separate his artistic process into discrete steps. Besides, a cloud of steam rose a moment later as Grishnazk plunged a hot lump of silver into a barrel, and that obscured the motions further.  
  
Harry yawned, wrinkling his nose, and raised a hand absently to touch his face. The sharp ridges were like pieces of obsidian naturally, and so he _did_ wear a spell that protected anyone who touched him—including himself—from having their skin sliced open. But he had refused to wear a glamour.  
  
He could still remember Draco’s fury over that.  
  
If he closed his eyes, he could see Malfoy standing in front of him, eyes closed, furious words emerging from between tightly-shut lips. He’d been naked. Had that been the last time Harry ever saw him like that? He thought so.  
  
 _“All I want to know is why you won’t try.” Draco’s voice soared and broke. He forgot himself and glanced at Harry’s face, then wrapped his fingers around his forehead, as if that would erase the sight from his eyes, and shuddered.  
  
Harry kept his expression locked in a glare, but he felt as though Draco had killed Ron in front of him. The one thing he had never thought to encounter from Draco, after everything else they’d been through, after Draco and Harry had both fought to reconcile their friends to their living together, after Draco had been willing to defy his parents and withstand the attention of the press, was simple rejection because of ugliness.   
  
It made him wonder if Draco had ever really loved him at all. Maybe he hadn’t loved the fame or the scar, but had he loved the green eyes and Harry’s scarless skin and nothing else?  
  
“Because it would be dishonest,” said Harry. “And I don’t want to hide from the world and indulge their stupid sensibilities. They’ll get used to me or they won’t. This is a way of seeing who my real supporters are. And I don’t want to act as if this is something I should be ashamed of_. I _didn’t do this to me. It was Lestrange, and Greyback, and—“  
  
“I know that!” Draco’s voice had risen to a shout. “But you act like you’re proud of it, displaying it everywhere—“  
  
“Tell me, Draco,” Harry demanded. “If I’d lost a limb, or if the scarring was somewhere other than on my face, would you have said the same things to me?”  
  
“It would be different if you could cover it up with clothing,” Draco snarled into his hands. “And you could get artificial limbs. They make them—“  
  
“Not well, or Mad-Eye Moody would have had one.”  
  
Draco shuddered. “There are things you could do to repair it,” he murmured. “There are things you could do to make your skin smooth and pure again.—“  
  
“So I’m impure because I’m scarred?” Harry wanted to smash, to hit, to destroy things. He turned away so that the magic pulsing out of control around him would only hurt vases or tables and not Draco; the destruction tended to follow the line of his eyesight. He swallowed, and it felt as though part of his throat had been torn out, too. His torturers hadn’t had time to reach his neck before Harry’s magic went mad and killed them, but he knew they’d intended to. Would Draco have accepted scarring on the neck? He wondered for a moment, but he knew the truth. Draco couldn’t really accept it, no matter what he said. He only thought that scars elsewhere would be easier to cover up.  
  
“That’s not what I meant.” Draco had gained some semblance of control over his voice, but that only made it sound all the tighter. “You—you need to show that you have some regard for me, too. I’m showing you more love than I ever knew I could by staying with you at all.”  
  
Harry gritted his teeth, and a flash of pain exploded behind his eyes as a vase exploded in front of him. He couldn’t help hearing Draco’s faint gasp even over the sound of breaking porcelain. He opened his eyes and stared bleakly at the shards lying on the ground in front of him, then shook his head, wondering if Draco had gasped out of fear or anger or simply surprise. “I think that I never knew what your love was based on,” he said.  
  
“That’s not fair.” Draco’s voice was ragged. “Harry, do you know how hard it’s been for me in the past weeks, since you were captured? First I had to fear that you were dead. Then I heard you were rescued, and I wasn’t even able to help with that. Then I heard you were wounded, but no one would tell me how bad it was. And the end of all that uncertainty was learning that you look—like this—and you refuse to honor even my request to repair it.”  
  
“Repair it.” Harry held out a hand and watched as the fragments of the vase rose and began to orbit one another, gradually forming a whole shape out of the air and the dust. “You make me sound like a precious object, Draco, one that you don’t know the_ Reparo _spells to fix yourself.”  
  
“And that’s not fair, either!” Draco spat. “Don’t you ever think about me, Harry? Don’t you ever think that I might not want to be seen in public with someone like you?”  
  
“Is this about my face?” Harry asked, turning to stare at him. “Or my history?”  
  
Draco immediately stared at the floor. Harry couldn’t see the whole of his expression, but he saw the pale cheeks and the tinge of green around his lips, and that was enough.  
  
“You didn’t care about dating the Boy-Who-Lived,” Harry whispered. “That much was real. But it seems that you cared more than I ever thought about dating someone good-looking.”  
  
“I was raised with beauty all around me!” Draco flushed with outrage, but he still didn’t look up. “You can’t blame me for finding it hard to love someone who looks like you do now. A monst—“ He stopped, breathing through his nose.  
  
Harry had turned and walked out of their house. Years together, and it wasn’t enough, he thought dimly as he paced down the steps. In the end, blood prejudices were easy for Draco to give up, easier than Harry had expected.  
  
He had to wonder, now, if it was because blood differences weren’t visible on the skin._  
  
Harry opened his eyes and sighed. Such a struggle to move on from that, to stop raging and missing Draco’s presence in his bed. But he _had_ done it, and though Draco’s words might bring back bad memories, they couldn’t make Harry regret his decision. He needed to be able to live with himself because he could live with anyone else, and that meant accepting honesty and not covering his face with more than spells intended for safety.  
  
The sight of his face alone did harm to no one. Draco had never understood that.  
  
Harry straightened, aware that he was smiling, and that Grishnazk was casting him a curious glance under half-lowered eyelids. He would be wondering why Harry looked so happy after such a violent encounter with a former lover. But then he seemed to realize that Harry was looking at the copper pattern, and he bobbed his head like a bird pecking after crumbs. “It’s lovely, yes it is,” he said.  
  
“It is.” Harry moved forwards, his fingers hovering above the endless melting but solid loops of the material. He tried to trace the direction of those loops with his eyes, and couldn’t. Whilst he was singing the tune for the metal to dance to, he understood the pattern in its entirety, but he always lost it the moment he returned to normal.  
  
He had needed this craft when Malfoy lost him, needed something that would absorb him entirely. And so he had worked to perfect it, his own bitterness acting as a goad. He couldn’t be good at most of the things he had been good at anymore; the crippled leg wouldn’t let him play Quidditch, and the Auror training he had been half-heartedly pursuing was also out of the question. Even a simple meal in a restaurant became arduous when he had a hundred stares to contend with and no lover at his side whose love he had depended on.   
  
He had decided, after reading an article in the _Daily Prophet_ one day about the damage that Memory Charms did to the brain—the article had been prompted by Gilderoy Lockhart’s recent death—that there should be a means of protecting wizards and their property from Muggles that didn’t involve the need for Obliviators. And that combined with his newly-discovered fascination for music and forging, crafts intricate enough that they needed all his concentration, to create metal-dancing.  
  
Grishnazk hauled another series of strips, dripping and shining, from the water, and Harry turned to face them, gathering and settling his thoughts. This sigil would be silver, which was perhaps the most powerful protective metal in wizarding magic, with all sorts of associations—but, precisely for that reason, needed to be handled more carefully than the copper. He couldn’t think of Malfoy when he was doing this.  
  
But he could spare one thought for him, and the fact that, disgust or not, he’d still come to seek Harry out when there was no reason to do so, and he’d still been powerfully affected by the sight of him.  
  
They would have to work at Draco’s estate for at least a week more. There was time, perhaps, during that period for Harry to help Draco towards the same sort of reconciliation, of making peace with circumstance and reality, that he had managed to arrive at himself.


	2. Monsters Working the Forge

  
“Daddy?”  
  
Draco started and snapped his gaze back to his son. He couldn’t see the shed that the Metal-Dancers had set up from this window, he reminded himself, and Scorpius should be more than enough to hold anyone’s attention.  
  
Draco’s two-year-old son was leaning up against the pillows of his bed, carefully turning a practice wand in his hands. Malfoy tradition had always insisted that the children were best off when exposed to magic as soon as possible, and so Lucius had given Scorpius the wand before he and Draco left Malfoy Manor to come to the new estate so it could be warded against Muggles. Scorpius hadn’t left off playing with it ever since, as if he wanted to understand every grain of the wood. Draco knew that was a hopeful sign for his son’s future magical prowess.  
  
Merlin, but his son was beautiful. His hair was darker than Draco’s, but only by a shade, closer to Astoria’s honey-gold than to the silver platinum that Lucius and Draco both possessed. His eyes were blue-gray, a perfect combination of his grandparents’, and Draco was always finding some new fleck of color every time he looked into them. He had skin that would never know a spot—Draco would take care of that with magic, if it didn’t happen naturally—and still glowed with both Malfoy pallor and baby softness. Draco watched him turning the wand over and over, and experienced a deep sensation of peace.  
  
Then Scorpius gave him an impatient look that belonged on his mother’s face, and Draco shook his head and remembered that his son had asked him a question. “Yes, Scorpius?” He reached out and ran a hand over his son’s head. Scorpius leaned tamely against him, accepting the petting as his natural due. Draco could admit, if only in the privacy of his mind, that he didn’t look forwards to the day when Scorpius would decide that he was too grown-up for such attentions. Draco himself had been four when he started squirming away from his mother’s kiss.  
  
“Who are the funny people?” Scorpius looked up at him with large, drowning eyes, confident that his question would be perfectly understood the first time.   
  
And Draco did understand it, although he didn’t want to, and his hand grew heavier on Scorpius’s head for a moment. Then he forced a smile and continued ruffling his fingers gently through the honey hair. “They’re called dwarves,” he said. “They came to work the forge and protect our estates.”  
  
“Oh. Who’s the big one?”  
  
“There’s a big dwarf?” Draco widened his eyes comically. “But they’re small, like you.”  
  
“ _Not_ like me,” said Scorpius. “They have hair here.” He tugged at his chin. “And they smell bad.”  
  
Draco relaxed. At times, before magical children came to understand the differences between wizards and creatures, they made unfortunate mistakes and held unfortunate opinions. It sounded as though Scorpius would not put him through any embarrassing explanations. “They do,” he agreed. “But who’s the big one?”  
  
“He has dark hair,” said Scorpius, pulling away and beginning to bounce in the bed, because that was one of his amusements lately. The covers, a dark green color, rippled and shone around him, and Draco felt as though his heart had caught like his breath for a moment. “And he walks like _this_.” Scorpius crooked his fingers in the shape of legs and ran them awkwardly up and down his leg, giggling. He never stopped bouncing, looking up at Draco with innocent trust, his eyes so wide that Draco thought he could see the future in them.  
  
And then Scorpius’s words caught up with him, and he swallowed hard, his anger beating in him like a second heart. How _dare_ Potter show himself to a child who didn’t have the understanding yet to process what he saw! Draco would have to have another talk with him, and make it clear that such behavior was unacceptable. Maybe Draco didn’t have the right to force his lover into a glamour, but he _did_ have the right to control what his child heard and saw.  
  
 _Of course, if you had decided to hire some other company of Metal-Dancers besides this one to protect your home, the situation would never have arisen._  
  
Draco ignored the thought and stood. Of course he had hired Potter’s Metal-Dancers; they were the best company in Britain, and Malfoys deserved only the best, even for an estate that would be used for charity functions so that none of the unwashed needed to intrude into Malfoy Manor. Once on the grounds, it was Potter’s duty to do what was asked of him.  
  
 _Even if you were to ask him to come to you and let you explain, to listen to you without interrupting, to—_  
  
Draco turned his head sharply away. He had had these fantasies since his confrontation with Potter yesterday, imaginary scenes in which Potter exonerated him. But that was all they were, fantasies. Potter was too stubborn and hard-headed to forgive someone when he refused to do something small like make his face beautiful again. And what had Draco to be forgiven for, anyway? If anything, Potter’s face showed that _he_ was the one who must have done—something—in order to be scarred that way. Things that bad were attracted to the people they happened to, instead of simply occurring.  
  
At least, Draco had to think so. That way, he knew nothing that bad would ever happen to _him_ , if he was lucky and careful.  
  
“Daddy?”  
  
Draco looked back at Scorpius, who had stopped bouncing and was sucking his finger instead. He took it out of his mouth with a loud smacking noise to observe, “You never said who the big dwarf was.”  
  
“Someone you have to stay away from,” said Draco, regaining his voice. “Do you understand, Scorpius? You aren’t to go visiting.”  
  
“Oh.” Scorpius put his head down and pouted.  
  
“You mustn’t see him.”  
  
Scorpius nodded, still staring at the bedcovers.  
  
“I shall be _very angry_ if I hear that you were with him,” Draco added repressively. He didn’t like being this stern with his son, who usually had everything exactly the way he wanted it, but he had to be. The mere thought of Scorpius slicing his palm open on Potter’s face provoked shudders all down his body.  
  
“All right, Daddy.” Scorpius yawned and lay down, kicking his feet out as if he expected a pillow to brace them. Draco fetched one for him, and Scorpius smiled angelically up at him from his usual sleeping posture, pillows at both head and feet. So sweet, Draco thought, stroking his son’s hair again, and so spoiled. Well, there was nothing wrong with that when the parents had the money and beauty necessary to back up the spoiling, as Draco did.  
  
“Good night, Daddy,” said Scorpius, as he always did no matter what time of day he took a nap, and closed his eyes. Draco kissed his forehead and stepped back, feasting his gaze on Scorpius’s features again. The rest of the time, he saw little of himself in his son, but when asleep, Scorpius looked exactly like the photographs Narcissa had taken of Draco sleeping when he was young.  
  
“Good night,” Draco responded quietly, and stepped out of the nursery, shutting the door behind him with a gentle thump. He thought of calling house-elves to attend on his son, but he had business affairs to think of now that Scorpius was asleep, and he would need the elves to fetch and carry for him whilst he calculated.  
  
Besides, Scorpius had a bell he could ring beside the bed that would summon an elf or his father in a moment if he had a nightmare. Draco went downstairs, thoughts of expenses buzzing in his head. He had to pay the Metal-Dancers, and he had to decide what the first charity event they held at this estate would be, and he had to decide which charities were both the most worthy of benefiting and the most politically interesting.  
  
He thought he heard a faint creak behind him once, but the house was old, and _did_ tend to settle. There was no point in worrying about it.  
  
*  
  
Harry poured a cup of water over his head, and sighed in relief as it flowed, cool and stinging, into his eyes and then down the folded ridges of his face. His skin felt little, caught and crumpled like tissue paper in the wake of those scars, but he could still sense the sweat sloughing off and the heat from the forge draining away. He shook his head vigorously, then plunged it into the bucket of water that stood next to him and came up spluttering.  
  
“Well,” said a thoughtful, amused voice from the door of the shed, which Harry reserved to himself to pick among the different metals and look for impurities in them, “I thought you might need company, but you’re so busy, I don’t know if you do.”  
  
Harry spun around, smiling. “Ginny!”  
  
Ginny stepped forwards and into his arms. Harry held her tightly, running one hand up and down the back of her robe—but he didn’t press on the skin itself. He knew how the scars there had the tendency to become inflamed at any touch heavier than cloth.   
  
Ginny stepped back at last and stared him in the face. Her own wasn’t nearly as scarred as his, but she still had a long, jagged stripe that ran from the top left corner of her face to the bottom right, and ridged her nose and removed her right eye on the way. Her other scars were mostly elsewhere; the Death Eaters had worked on her leg and spine the same way they’d worked on his. Harry thought he’d escaped more lightly than she had there. She found it difficult to sit without pain, whilst Harry could at least sit down whenever his leg cramped.  
  
A spasm ran up his leg now, and Harry drew his wand to conjure a chair. It was only metal-dancing that he was able to do wandlessly. As he sat down, Ginny conjured a stool and then added several modified Cushioning Charms to it. With the angle she had to lean at, she was taller than he was sitting, and she regarded him frankly as Harry stared back at her in amusement.  
  
“What are you doing working for Malfoy?” Ginny asked. Perhaps her silent scan hadn’t told her everything she needed to know, then.  
  
Ginny had the right to ask him such blunt questions. She had endured the torture with Harry, and then been one of the people to draw him back into the world, as he had helped to do with her. They had been lovers for a short, intense time after he separated from Draco, their shared experiences acting like a rope to join them. Harry owed her for everything from making him laugh just a day after he had walked away from Draco to teaching him how he could make love without irritating his scars, or hers.  
  
“I don’t know, really.” Harry linked his hands meditatively in front of him. “Will you believe that he pays well, and, if we do this commission well, we’ll earn more attention and commissions still?”  
  
He grinned at her, but Ginny raised an eyebrow and waited. Harry sighed and looked towards the manor house, imagining Draco in the midst of his beautiful life, tending to his duties, never thinking once of Harry. “I had the stupid idea that he might want me back,” he muttered.  
  
“Er, Harry,” said Ginny, after a breathless pause. “He was the one who rejected you.”  
  
“But I was the one who walked away.” Harry looked at her. “Who knows what might have happened if I’d fought for him? And anyway, I still want him.”  
  
“I don’t understand _why_.”  
  
Harry leaned his forehead in his palm and stared at the floor. It was a question Hermione and Ron had asked him when they found out Harry regretted the break-up with Draco, and so Harry could only tell Ginny the same thing he’d told them. “I’ve never met someone who’s so purely _himself_ as Draco is. He doesn’t apologize for his appetites or his illusions. Those illusions break, but he thinks about it for a while and then goes on living after that. He can conquer so many challenges because he doesn’t really think of them as challenges. They can’t shake his self-confidence. He doesn’t doubt. He just charges ahead. I admire his certainty.”  
  
“He won’t apologize for his treatment of you if he’s like that,” Ginny said gently.  
  
Harry winced. “I know. Maybe this is meant more as a way to get over him _myself_ , to look at those characteristics and take a breath of the air that surrounds him and then say good-bye.”  
  
Ginny chewed her lip for a moment, then nodded and stood up. “I came to see how you were getting along, when Ron and Hermione told me you’d actually accepted a commission on Malfoy property,” she said. “I should have known you would go and do something that stupid when I went off with Neville.”  
  
Harry smiled and also rose to his feet. He was happy for Ginny that Neville had managed to look past her scars and accept her for who she was, though he had to admit he felt envy, too, when he was lying awake at night. “Thank you. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to affect the outcome of this, except me and him. And maybe not even me,” he added, remembering the brick-wall force of Draco’s revulsion, then and now.  
  
Ginny nodded once, then punched him on the shoulder like her brother and said, “If you get hurt—well. There are a few boggarts I know that need a new place to stay.” She gave him a sweet smile. Ginny worked as a remover of Dark magical creatures; that seemed to be work that most people would trust her with, perhaps because they assumed her scars would frighten the boggarts and the doxies as much as they frightened them.  
  
“Gin,” Harry said.  
  
She put up her hand. “I’m not saying it’ll happen, because we don’t know if he’ll hurt you again, do we? Just that he should be careful, that’s all.”  
  
Harry kissed the top of her head. “I don’t deserve you.”  
  
“Of course not,” Ginny said. “And Malfoy doesn’t deserve you.” She ducked out the door of the shed before Harry could scold her again. He rolled his eyes and turned in the chair to consider the sheet of silver in front of him Grishnazk wanted to use it for the roofing sigils that would protect the ancient estate from the ravages of weather—Harry was the first Metal-Dancer to adapt the protective symbols for that function—but Harry had his doubts about its purity, which would affect how easy it was to work with.  
  
“You’re the big dwarf.”  
  
Harry controlled his reaction with a small twitch and glanced over his shoulder. A young boy stood in the door of the shed, staring at him with fascinated eyes. Harry would have known him for Draco’s son if he’d seen him far away from the house. He had that ruffled blond hair, the smooth and shining face.  
  
Harry raised an eyebrow. Well, he’d known Draco had a son; the news of the marriage contract with Astoria Greengrass had appeared in the papers less than a month after he and Draco broke up. “My name’s Harry Potter,” he said. “And I don’t think your father would be pleased if you were here.” He had a habit of speaking to children exactly as if they could understand him, picked up because Ron and Hermione’s daughter Rose really _could_.  
  
The boy shook his head, disregarding this, and came forwards, staring at him critically. Harry fought the impulse to raise a hand and shield his face from sight. This was part of the reason he didn’t wear a glamour, so that people could get used to what he really looked like—and thus to the results of uncontrolled Dark magic. Over the last few years, Harry had come to think that the reason the Dark Arts were still popular and practiced had a lot to do with the way Healers hurried to cover up the result of any curse.  
  
So he stared at the boy, and the boy stared at him, and finally said, “You have the scars.”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “I know.”  
  
“The scars on your face,” the boy went on, blithely ignoring his tone, “and the scar on your face.” He reached up and traced a finger down his forehead.   
  
Harry started and touched his forehead with a self-consciousness he hadn’t felt in years. The scarring of his face had rather buried the lightning bolt that had caused him so much trouble. It was still visible, in a patch of the stretched, flat, shiny skin between the sharp gray and black ridges, but few people looked for it any more.  
  
“You’re Harry Potter,” the boy said, as if that meant Harry passed some test, and then stretched out his arms commandingly. “Pick me up.”  
  
Harry did, and grunted a little as he settled the boy on his lap. He was heavier than he looked, especially for someone less than three years old. Knowing Draco and the Malfoy house-elves, he was probably fed too many sweets and not let near much physical exercise yet. “What’s your name?”  
  
“I’m Scorpius Malfoy,” the child said, with a pride that made Harry have to swallow tears, because of course that _was_ exactly the way Draco’s son would sound. “And I want to know about this.” He pointed at the sheet of silver. “What are you doing?”  
  
“I’m a Metal-Dancer.” Harry reached out and picked up his wand, gesturing so that the sheet of silver tipped over on its corner. Scorpius considered this, then pulled a practice wand from his own robe pocket.  
  
“I want it to spin,” he said, and pointed the wand. “ _Zappus_!”  
  
Harry, concealing a smile, obeyed, and the silver danced in place, rotating to brush first one corner and then another against the table it rested on. Scorpius accepted his triumph with grave aplomb and tugged at Harry’s sleeve.   
  
“Sweets,” he suggested.  
  
Harry had no sweets on him, but he Summoned a bit of bread left over from his sandwich and told Scorpius, “This bread went on adventures with me. It was in a mine where we fetched home copper, and in high mountains where an avalanche almost fell on us as we brought gold back.” That wasn’t quite true, but Harry _did_ possess an Everlasting Loaf that this piece of bread had been hacked from, and other bits of the Loaf had been on those adventures with him. “Do you want to eat it?”  
  
“Yes, please,” said Scorpius, and took the bread away and ate it with something like reverence. Then he slid off Harry’s lap, gripped his hand, and announced, “My Daddy will be angry. Come back to the house.”  
  
“I can’t do that,” said Harry, though he hated to watch Scorpius’s face cloud over, and not just because he might cry. “Your daddy doesn’t like me.”  
  
“But you have bread, and magic, and scars,” said Scorpius, as if this meant it was extremely unlikely that anyone would hate Harry.  
  
“He hates me for the scars.”  
  
Scorpius blinked and tilted his head to the side, as if studying Harry’s face in this new and unexpected light. Then he said. “That’s stupid,” and pulled on Harry’s hand again.  
  
“Well, it’s true.” Harry wasn’t about to try explaining the whole tangle of their relationship to Draco’s son, who probably hadn’t ever heard Draco say that he loved anyone besides Scorpius’s mother. He looked towards the door of the shed, but no vengeful Draco appeared—yet. He looked back at the little boy, studied his eyes, which were wide and earnest but didn’t hold any understanding, and said, “He wouldn’t want me in the house.”  
  
Scorpius stood there chewing his lip for a moment, his head tilted as if he were eating another morsel of bread that Harry had offered him and trying to decide if he liked the taste. Then he said, “That’s still stupid.”  
  
“But real.” Harry crouched down in front of Scorpius so that the boy wouldn’t have any choice but to take him more seriously. “And I don’t think your father would want me to talk to you. At all.”  
  
Scorpius smiled and patted Harry’s cheek, not even flinching after his fingers came in contact with one particularly sharp, obsidian-colored ridge, though he did look at them in interest afterwards, as if to judge whether Harry had rubbed off on him. “My Daddy loves me,” he said. “And I like you, so he’ll have to like you.”  
  
Harry shook his head, but said nothing more, standing and following Scorpius’s tug towards the door. At the least, he would make sure the boy got back to the house and didn’t wander off in pursuit of the dwarves or the metal they were forging. Some of them wouldn’t be as patient with Scorpius.   
  
Harry blinked when they stepped out into the sunlight, and then looked towards the house. He forgot which pure-blood family it had belonged to before Draco bought it, but it was absolutely enormous, with a tower at each corner, like linchpins digging it more solidly into the earth. Its walls were white stone in some places, and gray stone in others, with flashes of greenery along the walls where the gardens still stood. It had no wards left, though, or other defenses, which was one reason that Draco had hired Harry’s Metal-Dancers to guard the place.  
  
“My bedroom’s there,” Scorpius said, and pointed at one of the towers. Squinting, Harry could make out a single window sparkling like a sapphire—some kind of ward already planted, doubtless. Harry knew Draco could be protective of those he loved. “You have to come with me and play with my toys.”  
  
“ _Scorpius_!”  
  
Draco was running towards them across the lawn, his face so white that Harry could see it even from this distance. Harry quickly let go of Scorpius’s hand and stepped back. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, but Draco wouldn’t see it that way, and Scorpius was his child to raise, not Harry’s.  
  
 _No matter how much you might wish otherwise_ , he reminded himself, as he watched Draco swing Scorpius up into his arms, clasp him to his chest, and stare at Harry as if he were a slaver.  
  
“Oh, hullo, Daddy,” said Scorpius. He wriggled around so he could see Harry again. “This is Harry Potter, and he—“  
  
“He’s going away now,” Draco said.  
  
Harry raised his hands in useless protest of his innocence, and then turned around and limped away. He had never felt so conscious of his dragging right leg since he received the wound.  
  
On the other hand, the horror in Draco’s eyes confirmed what Harry should have realized before: that Draco thought him a monster in soul as well as body. He really never should have come here. The Draco he loved, who could have looked past the scars and might have tried, had never existed.  
  
*  
  
“I want you to stay away from him, Scorpius.” Draco shook his son’s shoulders slightly as he looked into his eyes.  
  
“Why?” Scorpius was looking at his face with an interest that Draco knew was a bad sign. The _bad_ thing about raising a spoiled child, he thought despondently, was that he didn’t understand what it meant when you forbade him to do something.  
  
Draco shuddered. He could still see the image of Potter’s hand close-clasped in Scorpius’s if he closed his eyes. And it made a dreadful shiver run through him, something that he thought was composed of too little loathing and too much yearning.  
  
 _People are often fascinated by what they fear_ , he reminded himself, and opened his eyes to stare sternly at Scorpius. “Because I want you to.”  
  
Scorpius just looked at him and said nothing. Draco knew he couldn’t count on his son to obey when he wore that expression.  
  
 _Then I’ll have to make sure he listens to me._  
  
I don’t—I can’t take another loss. Not again.  
  
And the fact that he couldn’t articulate what the second loss would be didn’t bother him as much as the strange sweetness shaking open broad wings inside him when he thought of Potter standing near his son.


	3. Truth and Illusion

  
The sparks flew and leaped around the forming pattern as they often did around the real forge when Grishnazk was working the metal. Harry was glad that he had the skill to lose himself in the process, to think fully about the changes taking place under his magic instead of about Draco.  
  
The pattern, already tilted dangerously sideways, wobbled, and for a moment seemed to slump towards the ground like a disintegrating pudding. The light that haunted it darkened; the magic that looped and chained it to Harry weakened, and he felt his instinctive understanding of the labyrinth he had created slip away with the power.  
  
 _No_! He could lose all the time he liked to brooding when he wasn’t working, but there was no way that he would let his creations suffer because of his inability to put his infatuation with Draco in the past, where it belonged.  
  
Harry stretched out a hand and made a sideways wrenching motion. The silver figure, something like a vastly ornamented musical note at the moment, tilted back upright. Harry began to sing again, envisioning his voice as anchors on either side of the single large circle at the bottom of the pattern, to balance and hold it where he willed. His magic rose and surged like the sea against which the pattern struggled.  
  
He envisioned a subtle, slinking confusion moving into a Muggle’s mind, creating less havoc than a Memory Charm or the Repelling Charms that sometimes caused mental illness when cast by a careless wizard. He willed that image to emerge into his voice, and that in turn encouraged the metal to flourish up and down like glass, coiling and dipping like braided hair, brilliant with colors that molten silver normally never wore, scintillating bands of obsidian and amethyst.  
  
Harry smiled a little, spared a corner of his mind to comment on how much more encrusted with gems and metals his metaphors had become since spending time with the dwarves, and then went on singing.  
  
*  
  
He didn’t appear to notice he had an audience.  
  
Draco stood with one hand clutched around the doorway of the shed, as he could only imagine his son must have stood earlier—when Scorpius had _disobeyed his orders_ and _sneaked out here_ —and stared at Potter in awe.  
  
He wasn’t working in the large shed this time, and when Draco allowed himself to think about how an ordinary person and not Potter would have reacted, he supposed he could see the sense of that. He wouldn’t want an audience for the anger and disappointment that too clearly played across his scarred features at being rejected yet again. The Harry Draco had known had been the same way; he would take his broom up to absurd heights or vanish into a corner of a forest he’d camped in during his year on the run with Granger and Weasley rather than face up to the cause of his discomfort.  
  
But now he poured his frustrations and anger into creating art.  
  
Draco ground his teeth together a moment later. It was not art. It was a profession, a career, the kind of thing Harry had always needed to support himself and engage his attention. He’d never appreciated the cultivated art of doing absolutely nothing. He and Draco had frequently argued about it, and Draco had prevailed enough that Harry hadn’t ever seriously trained as an Auror, but he had done something worse: he had gone into dangerous situations anyway, without the appropriate training.  
  
 _He never once thought about me. He never understood that I might need him just as much as those hapless innocents he was so bloody set on protecting. And then that happened, and took him away from me forever._  
  
But if Draco had to keep himself away from some dangerous admissions, there were others he had enough pride in himself to make. And the first was that he would not be thinking about Potter in such detail if the door was truly shut forever.  
  
With his back turned, he could almost be handsome, Draco thought in despair. At least he didn’t wear clothes that would expose the scars seaming his bad leg and the lower half of his spine. Draco had found those as disgusting to look at as the ones on his face, if only because they had spoiled Potter’s walk in the way that the ones on his face had not impaired his hearing and his eyesight. They forced Draco to think of him as wounded, and not only deformed.  
  
And then Potter made a little lunging jump to the side as a spark from the pattern he was making leaped at him and sizzled near his skin. The jump had a slide at the end that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but which couldn’t escape Draco’s observant eyes. Draco curled his lip. Yes, that spoke of a man used to living with a limp.  
  
How could he— _accommodate_ it? Why was he pretending that it couldn’t be changed? Why did he care so much and so fiercely about what other people might think of him if he covered up the visible scars with glamours and sought more expensive help than St. Mungo’s could offer?  
  
 _There’s a good reason that Mother told me not to get involved with people like Potter_ , Draco thought darkly. _It’s not their honor or their chivalry that’s in question. It’s their damn stubbornness. They sacrifice people to principles._   
  
Draco would have helped Potter gladly, if his lover had been striving to become more normal. He would have helped gladly, because then it would be a sacrifice for _him_ , and not some ideal that would never look at Potter with beseeching eyes or lie next to him in bed. Really, by refusing that, Potter had denied Draco an opportunity to prove his love, and forced him to act small, mean, and petty.  
  
 _That’s it. I have to be free of this infatuation with him. I’ll have him to dinner in the Manor tonight, and I’ll use a Silencing Spell, if I have to, so that I can actually get my side of the story out. And I’ll make sure he listens to it. That’s all I need: some chance to make him realize how wrong he was._   
  
And Draco slipped away, before Potter could notice him and become angry that his precious privacy had been invaded.  
  
*  
  
Harry gaped at Grishnazk, and left the towel hovering in the air to wipe at his temple by itself. “You’re joking,” he said.  
  
The dwarf stared at him, his grip on the coil of copper wire he’d forged that afternoon tightening. “I do not joke,” he said. “Not about things like this. Not where they touch on the accuracy of your skill, or the purity of our materials, or what we will be able to accomplish in half an hour’s time.”  
  
It was true—most dwarves had less of a sense of humor than Lucius Malfoy did—but Harry still couldn’t believe it. He shook his head. “Mistaken, then,” he said. “You’re mistaken. You must have misheard Draco when he spoke to you.”  
  
Grishnazk gave his head a small toss and turned away, his left foot clumping as heavily along the ground as Harry’s wounded one did. “I thought you different from other wizards,” he said, “less willing to discount the evidence of your ears when you hear someone nonhuman speak the truth. In that, _I_ was mistaken.”   
  
“No, no, wait, I’m sorry.” Harry hastened around in front of him and knelt down to his eye level. The dwarf glared steadily at him, and Harry winced. He had forgotten how angry Grishnazk could get when his honor was touched, because most of the time now Harry was polite and sensible enough not to do any such thing. “I only meant that Draco Malfoy is so stubborn and proud I would _rather_ believe it was a mistake in your hearing than believe that he’s unbent a bit.” He hesitated, then risked a joke of his own. “Him actually changing his mind could be a sign that the world is coming to an end.”  
  
Slowly, Grishnazk’s grip on the coil of copper wire relaxed, though he never once ceased his steady stare at Harry.  
  
“I heard aright,” he said, voice still sharp enough to score diamond. “And you heard my words. Draco Malfoy bids you to dinner in his new estate of Morningswood, the first guest to grace its halls. He bade me,” Grishnazk added, with a twitch of his beard, “remember the forms.” And he left with a fierce stiffness to his back that Harry knew would take some time to wear away.  
  
Harry stood up to stare after him, and then winced as dragonfire seemed to eat his bad leg alive. He always did pay that price when he moved too quickly, though most of the time now he was also too sensible to do that.  
  
 _This is my day for being stupid, then._  
  
For long moments, Harry stood there and wondered if he should go. After all, Draco had made his feelings _quite_ clear this afternoon. Harry didn’t think he could have any purpose to this invitation except to rub in the point a little more, and Harry didn’t feel like being an object lesson for Scorpius, or whatever it was that Draco planned for him. His days of willingly serving Draco Malfoy’s whims were over.  
  
But if he didn’t go, then he would probably have to deal with a confrontation in the morning—and that would put him in a worse light in Scorpius’s eyes still. At least, if he went into Draco’s house on Draco’s invitation and Draco was the one who stormed and shouted at him, there was a chance that Scorpius, unusually intelligent for a two-year-old, would realize that his father was the one being stupid.  
  
Harry went to cast Cleaning Charms on himself, wondering a bit why he cared so much for Scorpius’s good opinion. But the consideration was soon buried in another idea, much more amusing, which made him smile as he conjured a waterfall to crash over his head and burnish some of the sweat off the cracked and seamed skin of his face.   
  
Draco would have to sit at a table and eat dinner with him—something he hadn’t done since Harry was tortured, because of the way it made him feel to see that “perfect” mouth opening in that “disgusting” face.  
  
And he had inflicted it on himself.  
  
Harry whistled beneath his breath as he scratched at a particularly sharp ridge above his right ear that stood out like a horn. Sometimes, there was much to be said for Draco Malfoy’s whims.  
  
*  
  
The dinner was less horrible than Draco expected, and since he had both a vivid imagination and a vivid memory, he was deeply surprised. Of course, from the beginning the present was covered with a sparkling haze of the past. That was probably affecting his honest reactions to Harry, Draco considered.  
  
Harry had appeared calmly at the door of Morningswood, standing there as if he were invited to places as beautiful every day. And of course he stood in the middle of the corridor covered with intricate colored tiles that, looked at individually, meant nothing, but which blossomed into patterns of whirlwinds and whirlpools and spiderwebs when the viewer relaxed his eyes, and merely blinked once or twice.  
  
It was always a conceit of Harry’s to pretend that he had no taste. Draco knew he did, though, because he had chosen Draco as his lover in the first place. And if he wanted ugliness, he could have stayed with the Weasley girl, but he had broken up with her a few months after they began dating.  
  
Draco pushed that thought away from himself again, because he hated remembering how he had rejoiced when he read the story about Weasley in the gossip pages, and set himself to being as charming as possible. He had to keep Harry in the house long enough to hear his side of the story, after all.  
  
So he spoke softly and politely when they sat down at the table, with Scorpius seated next to Draco, and kept his eyes away from Harry’s mouth. If he had to see Harry swallowing regularly, and the horrible contrast of normal flesh next to ruined flesh, then he would lose his composure. Scorpius, of course, stared, but Harry seemed determined to ignore that. Perhaps he knew that a child had to be forgiven his reactions, because he wouldn’t have learned as much of courtesy as an adult would have.  
  
 _And perhaps he’s just waiting for a chance to infect Scorpius._  
  
Draco forced the thought away as hard and fast as he could, because if it lingered in his mind, it would unduly influence his speech. He _knew_ Harry’s scars weren’t contagious. Scorpius could touch them all day long—as he had already told Draco he had, causing Draco to wash his hands compulsively for the next hour—and never suffer any harm to his own radiant face.  
  
But Harry was a living reminder that bad luck had always haunted the life of the Chosen One. Draco, by contrast, had lived in a calm, charmed world where nothing bad ever happened to anyone, at least not after the war was over and the Dark Lord defeated. He didn’t want Harry to bring bad luck down on Scorpius by fascinating him too much.  
  
“I appreciate the invitation,” said Harry at last, laying his fork next to his plate. He remembered the manners Draco had taught him, heartbreakingly. Perhaps even more heartbreaking, Draco thought, was the fact that, just looking at Harry’s hands and chest, he could have imagined this man as someone he would share the rest of his life with. “But I know you. You never do things without at least two reasons, Draco. What’s the second one this time?”  
  
“Why do you assume you know the first?” Draco braced himself and looked into Harry’s eyes. The skin around those eyes was crumpled.   
  
_They heated my flesh until it bent_ , Harry had told him, _and then Greyback plunged his claws into it and pulled and jerked it up into these ridges and froze it again—_  
  
Draco chopped _that_ thought off at the root. Nothing was further from his plans than to let pity change his mind.  
  
“Because you’ve been polite and treated me to a good meal,” Harry said, his voice wry. “So I assumed you did want to see me. But what’s the second reason?”  
  
Draco took a long swallow of the sweet wine he’d allowed himself to drink with dinner, after long and careful consideration of the drinks he couldn’t have because he might swallow too much of them and lose his head. This wine wasn’t his favorite; he was in no danger from it.  
  
But that didn’t change the fact that he had to offer Potter an answer, and he didn’t have one.  
  
 _At least, not one that won’t make me look weak._  
  
“Daddy did want to see you,” said Scorpius, and leaned forwards. His eyes never left Harry. Draco wished he knew why. Scorpius was far too young to feel fascination for the same reasons Draco did, and in any case, Draco was raising him carefully, so that he would never succumb to the same weaknesses that had plagued Draco. “Because he misses you. He has a picture of you that he keeps in a cabinet. He locks the cabinet, but I stole the key.” He looked back at Draco. “Can I have sweets now?”  
  
Draco reeled, and nearly dropped a hand to grip the side of his chair, before he remembered how that would look to Potter. He stole a glance back at the man sitting across the table.  
  
“You have a picture of me?” Harry breathed.  
  
“Yes,” said Scorpius. “And he told me stories about you, too, how you saved the world. You had the scar. And you saved the world,” he added contentedly, apparently liking the phrase. He poked Draco in the side. “Sweets, Daddy?”  
  
*  
  
Harry _knew_ it was stupid. If Ron was here, he would bristle defensively and tell Harry in a loud voice that he had been right about ferrets once before, when Draco abandoned him, and he was right now. Hermione would shake her head tenderly and put a hand on his shoulder. Ginny would raise her eyebrows and ask what in the name of Merlin he thought he was doing.  
  
But sweetness had flooded his mouth, and his heart hovered in the middle of it. He leaned forwards across the table himself, unable to take his eyes from Draco’s face.   
  
Unable to stop hoping that, somewhere in the middle of that mass of prejudice and hatred and unwilling fascination with Harry as a walking horror show, lay the Draco he had remembered or imagined or made up.  
  
“Before or after I was scarred?” he whispered.  
  
Draco shook himself the way Crookshanks shook himself off after falling in the bath and wrapped his arms around his middle. “Before, of course,” he snapped. “Did you think I took any photographs of you _after_? Why in the world would I want them?”  
  
Harry took a deep breath, quelling his instinctive reaction to lash out in defense. He’d become used to speaking before he could be spoken to in the first year after the torture. A sharp insult usually stopped the reporters from asking stupid questions, such as whether his leg hurt. _Would I limp if it didn’t hurt, idiots?_  
  
But Draco had kept a photograph of him, and he had invited him to dinner tonight, when Harry would have said in the afternoon that Draco would do anything to keep Harry away from his precious child.  
  
There was a chance. Maybe a small one, but Harry wouldn’t be the one to blow out the light of hope, especially when he’d played such a strong part in doing that the first time they separated. Draco would have to do it himself this time.  
  
“What’s the second reason you invited me here?” he asked, and kept one hand braced on the table in front of him. If Draco showed the smallest sign of softening, of yielding, he would reach across the table and touch him. “Why? You could have ignored me. You could have ordered me off the property and called in one of my business partners to finish the work. You could have refused to hire me in the first place. I know you must have received recommendations for other Metal-Dancing companies. But you hired _me_. Why?”  
  
Draco was shrinking against the back of his chair. His eyes stayed locked on Harry’s face, as if the sight he had once abhorred was consuming his will to live. His hands had clenched into fists in front of him. Harry froze in his chair. He remembered the time Draco had looked like this and had lashed out when Harry tried to touch his hair, and that had been over a relatively minor incident, when Narcissa had refused to allow Draco to borrow several of her house-elves to set up a party. No telling what he might do now.  
  
But Harry no longer possessed enough will to halt his voice.  
  
“Did you miss me at all?” he asked. “Not the way I look now, not the way I was when we broke up. I know that. But before? Did you miss me?”  
  
“I believe, to do that,” said Draco, his voice low and cool, “to miss you, I would have had to be in love with you.”  
  
“But you were, Daddy,” said Scorpius, utterly confident, looking up at him with a faintly puzzled expression. “Mummy told me. I asked, ‘Why didn’t you stay with Daddy?’ and she said, ‘Because he only loves Harry Potter.’ I remember. It was a Tuesday. I had treacle tart for dessert.” He looked wistful. “I want treacle tart _now_.”  
  
With the mood he was in, Harry was willing to take even those words as a sign of encouragement. Draco had never liked treacle tart, but he had been willing to keep it around and serve it on occasion because he knew how much Harry adored it. It was a way for him to show affection without having to make gestures or speak words that he considered a sign of weakness. That he had kept it and served to his son—  
  
Harry shook his head slightly, not wanting to get his hopes up too high, but unable to avoid it. He had _existed_ on hope in the days after he was injured, hope that he would one day come to terms with himself, hope that he would one day overcome the crippling bitterness his parting from Draco had taught him. He couldn’t avoid saying now, “Draco, I’m not asking you to love me now, as I am. I just want to know that you did. And it sounds like you did.”  
  
Draco pressed further against the back of his chair. For long moments, there was no sound in the room but his breathing, and a soft rustling of cloth. Scorpius, apparently despairing of his father’s ability to give him sweets, had begun to look under the chair and around the tablecloth, as if they would appear that way. Knowing how well-trained the Malfoy house-elves were, Harry thought it possible they would, the moment the elves noticed that Scorpius wanted them.  
  
And then Draco lashed out in turn.  
  
“I did love you,” he said, in a low, grating voice that sounded to Harry like someone trampling on bones. “You were the one who hated _me_ , and the one who couldn’t even do a simple favor for me!”  
  
Harry dropped his hand to his side again, and told himself that he deserved the pain that flared through his chest, the death of hope that assaulted him. He was the one who had asked a question he knew he wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer to. “It wasn’t a favor. What you wanted—“  
  
“I did love you,” Draco repeated, his voice rising hysterically. “And you didn’t—Harry, you didn’t _try_. You could have kept looking for ways to heal your face and your leg. If St. Mungo’s didn’t help you, other people could. They would have helped the Boy-Who-Lived in all the countries in Europe. You had Malfoy money. You could have kept going. You could have—“  
  
“The Healers at St. Mungo’s said it couldn’t be reversed!” Harry yelled, and leaped to his feet. His bad leg spasmed. He didn’t give a fuck at the moment. “That was what I told you. The Dark curses sank too deep. It’ll _never_ be better, I’ll _never_ look any different than I do right now—“  
  
“Bollocks!” Draco screamed, and he was on his feet, too, furious tears shining in his eyes. Harry couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Draco cry. “You could have _tried_! For me, not for you! If you cared so bloody _much_ , you could have! And you could have worn a glamour! You could have—“  
  
Harry was sick of this, so sick, and his wandless magic reacted to the impatience and fury storming through him, in a way it normally only did when he was practicing metal-dancing. Then again, these were the emotions he had sunk often into metal-dancing in that first lonely, angry year, so perhaps it wasn’t such a shock that they would manifest now.  
  
He snapped his fingers, and a glamour spread across his features, restoring them to what they had been when Draco first met him. Harry remembered that face well enough. Hermione and Ron still kept photographs of his old self—though they loved him enough to include new pictures of him as well—and Harry had spent months staring at them in heartsick yearning, before he convinced himself that living in the past wasn’t living at all.  
  
So he stared at Draco, and Draco stared back at him, and the hunger in his eyes was so great it made Harry feel triumphant for a long moment.  
  
And then bitter, and so tired.  
  
“This isn’t me anymore,” he said softly. “Even if I hid all the scars with glamours, I’ll never be able to make love with my normal grace. I’ll never be able to ride a broom again. And _you would always know_ , Draco. You think you would be content with illusion, but you wouldn’t. I know you. That’s how you found me out in the first place and we moved in together, remember? I was trying to pretend I just liked fucking you, not anything else, and you insisted that was stupid and you wanted more than pretense.”  
  
“Harry,” Draco whispered. “It would have been enough, until we found a solution.”  
  
“And there is no solution,” Harry said—almost snapped, but this was too important for Draco to hear. “That’s what I’m telling you. You would have got disgusted with me eventually and left me. And maybe that’s why I walked away when I did,” he added, feeling as if the words were being pulled out of him, slowly, the way Greyback had threatened to pull out his intestines. “Because I would rather you felt disgust at me for my ugliness than because of my cowardice.”  
  
A wave of his hand banished the glamour, and he turned and walked out of the house.  
  
At the moment, he badly needed Ginny.  
  
*  
  
Draco sat down and put his head in his hands.  
  
For one moment, Harry, his beautiful Harry, had been standing across the table from him.  
  
And Draco knew, then, that nothing had changed for his body or his soul, however much his perceptions had altered.  
  
“ _Daddy_ ,” said Scorpius, in the voice of someone reminding him of what was really important. “ _Treacle tart_.”


	4. Hephaestus's Revenge

  
“Scorpius, I never want you to do anything like that again.” Draco paced up and down in front of the bed where his son sat, the same bed he had looked at Scorpius sitting in earlier that afternoon and pictured as the perfect setting for the perfect jewel of his son. Since then, Scorpius had shown so much will, and contradicted him so many times, that Draco looked back on his own earlier impressions in bewilderment. “You shouldn’t visit someone like Potter without my permission. You shouldn’t tell strangers secrets without knowing if it’s safe for them to know those secrets. And you _especially_ shouldn’t beg so persistently for sweets in front of a guest.” He swung towards Scorpius and delivered his verdict with an especially deadly stare. “It isn’t polite.”  
  
Scorpius usually cowered when he was informed that he’d been rude, and he asked penitently for some way that he could make it better. But now, he only lifted his head and gave his father a strong stare that Draco thought impudent.  
  
“I wasn’t rude,” said Scorpius, his tones edged with the polite disdain Draco thought he must have picked up from his mother. Certainly it couldn’t come from the Malfoy side, given how careful his education had been. “I only asked for sweets. And you’re in love with Mr. Potter. He’s not a stranger.”  
  
“Scorpius.” Draco gave an unblinking scowl at his son. “Your mother told you about him. I’ve never mentioned him. Why wouldn’t I mention him?”  
  
“Don’t you know?”  
  
Draco ground his teeth. Then he thought of what sort of lessons his clever and imitative son would pick up from _that_ , and made himself stop. It was not in his plans for Scorpius to have less than perfect teeth.   
  
“I didn’t mention him because we argued, and I was angry at him,” he said. “The way I shall be angry at you if you don’t start behaving better.”  
  
Scorpius stared up at him with wonder and something like pity in his shining eyes. Draco bristled to see it.  
  
For the first time, he wondered if he should have refused his anxious parents when they told him they wanted to perform certain spells on Scorpius that would enable his intelligence to develop faster than a normal child’s, and let him understand and retain learning that was usually forgotten by children twice his age. It had seemed a good idea at the time, because of course his son was to be superior in _everything_ , including cleverness, and when he got into Hogwarts, he could astonish and dazzle his teachers if he had knowledge that belonged to the upper years. A prodigy was one means of rescuing the Malfoy family from disgrace, and no one could say that they’d done anything illegal in obtaining their fame. Draco had let his parents cast the spells—which he knew they had researched to make sure they wouldn’t hurt Scorpius; Narcissa and Lucius would not damage their grandson—and train Scorpius hard in reading, music, and other subjects a Malfoy heir should know.   
  
But he hadn’t had the keen edge of that intelligence turned on _him_ before. It was that which made all the difference.  
  
“But,” said Scorpius calmly, “that’s a stupid reason.”  
  
Draco slammed his hand down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t know he was going to do it until it happened. He had never been violent around Scorpius, or at least he had always explained the cause of his bad temper and made sure Scorpius understood it wasn’t directed at him. Scorpius pushed himself back across the bed until he was leaning on the pillows and glared at Draco as if he were some strange creature who had come crawling into Morningswood in order to interrupt Scorpius’s good time.  
  
He looked at Draco, in fact, much as Draco knew he had looked at Harry when he first saw him in the dwarves’ shed.   
  
Draco found he had lost his stomach for the argument. He turned away, shaking his head, and said peremptorily, “You aren’t to go near Harry again. I’ll know if you do, and you’ll be punished.” And he stepped out of the room, just barely remembering not to slam the door behind him.  
  
For some moments he stood where he was, shaking, his eyes shut, and then he popped them open as a thought occurred to him.  
  
He _was_ still fascinated with Harry, more interested in him than he should be. But now he knew why that was. He had never allowed himself to think enough about those scars in the years that separated him from the person he had been, Harry’s lover. He needed to confront them, and then they would lose their hold over him.   
  
He had thought he was doing that at dinner, but then he hadn’t been close enough. And then Harry had cast the glamour over his face—  
  
Draco chopped that thought off at the knees. He was good at thinking about what he wanted to think about, and right now he wanted to think about those scars, not the glamour. He needed to be close. He needed to touch them, perhaps, assuming Harry had cast some spell on his face that would ensure Draco’s flesh wasn’t sliced to ribbons immediately.  
  
And he needed to hear the full story of the torture. Harry had never told him, preferring to selfishly keep it to himself with claims that he wasn’t ready to talk, and the papers had never managed to penetrate the confidential talks Harry had with the Minister on the subject.  
  
Draco lifted a chin that only trembled a little and strode firmly to his room, to collect a Quick-Quotes Quill and sheaf of parchment.   
  
He was going to win himself free of this injurious fascination. He was going to show Harry that he could not win the long contest between them.  
  
And woe to Harry if he tried.  
  
*  
  
“You are not concentrating.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and nodded. He was crouched in the middle of a series of cinders and circular burns on the dirt floor of the shed, all that remained of the latest pattern he had tried to forge. It had exploded in the middle, drops of molten metal leaping in several directions. Harry had furiously controlled the most dangerous section, the middle, which was afire, until Grishnazk could clean up the drops and come to help him support the burning coils of steel. Then he had dropped straight to the ground, spent, and remained there since. Grishnazk had allowed him to have five minutes of silence, which Harry knew was generous of the dwarf.  
  
 _I lost my focus._ That was all that mattered to him at the moment, rather than the person whom he had lost his focus over. Merlin, he had escaped into metal-dancing because he wanted to leave Draco behind him. And then he came here, to a place he had known would be hard to visit before he accepted the commission, and his concentration was fracturing as if someone had taken a hammer to it. It was unacceptable. Harry opened his eyes, mopped some sweat from his brow—as much as he could; some would collect in puddles on the half-hidden pieces of flat skin and need a towel to reach them—and nodded to Grishnazk, who stood hammering some platinum flat without even looking at the steady motion of his arm.  
  
 _That’s what I need to be like_ , Harry thought. _The worker, effortless about his work. Metal-dancing is something I’m good at, something where my looks don’t matter. I can’t allow Draco’s perceptions to control me_. He surged to his feet. _So what if I’ll probably never have another lover? I haven’t spent the past three years brooding about that, even after I broke up with Ginny. I’ll finish the patterns they need me for and then leave this damn estate, and leave the past behind me, too._  
  
“I know,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”  
  
Grishnazk studied his face doubtfully, one eyebrow arched, as if he were certain of Harry’s good intentions but not of his ability to keep his promise. Harry nodded again and tried to look as hard and competent as he could.   
  
“Very well,” said Grishnazk, and then hammered once more at the platinum and held it up—a simple circlet, because they couldn’t afford as much platinum as they could copper and silver, even with the bargains on Galleons that the goblins were giving them as a business owned partially by non-humans. “You’ll forge this?”  
  
Harry nodded, and Grishnazk tossed the circlet at him, a deliberate test. If Harry used his hands to catch it and keep it from falling to the ground, he knew Grishnazk’s opinion of him would suffer.  
  
He was too wise to try. Instead, he opened his mouth and sang a single, pure note, and the circlet jerked to a stop, wobbling from side to side.  
  
Harry backed up a step, his hands flipping through several swift circular patterns, his attention never wavering from the metal. Platinum was not like silver, an excellent conductor of magic, or copper, flexible and with a long history of use. It was harder to work with, more stubborn, more temperamental—more cautious, as the dwarves would say, who were fond of attributing personalities of their own to the various kinds of metal and gems they worked with.  
  
Harry whistled, now, coaxing the platinum to relax and soften around the edges, so that the circlet became a ring at the top of two long drooping streams of metal like tears. The ring vibrated, and a low chiming note worked its way out of it, which Harry wove into the substance of his song; it was easier to work with platinum if one used its song as a way to charm it. Twice up, twice down, a run of notes that blended into the metal and came back with a hard clang. Harry frowned. He had forgotten that, once past the outer surface of the platinum, it took more effort as well as more noise to find a workable compromise.  
  
He didn’t give up hope. He adjusted his voice instead, intoning a variation on a lullaby that he sometimes sang to Ron and Hermione’s children, but so loud that it rocked the walls of the shed and made Grishnazk take a step backwards. Irritated at himself for still noticing things happening outside his dance with the metal, Harry refocused his eyes and made himself become lost in the gold-white-silver sheen that broke from the platinum.  
  
Gold-white-silver. He had worked with gold, and he had worked with silver. Could it be possible to adapt the songs he used with them to speak to the platinum? This was an unusually stubborn piece; it had melted no more than a few drips, and now the drips were solidifying again.   
  
Harry whistled as though to call up the wind, the note he always used to start his silver songs, and then darted sideways and left into the lullaby again, approaching from the back in a slow spiral. The glow from the platinum altered, growing brighter; the center boss was melting at last, metal rising like ropes to twine about itself. Harry felt the sweat start under his hair and flow down the back of his neck. This was going to be a new pattern, then, unlike the others, which usually started with figure-eights and built up variations on that. Well. He was ready.  
  
He began to move backwards and to the side, allowing his wounded leg to drag the way it needed to. All the time, he never ceased whistling, coaxing, circling in, dashing sideways when the platinum’s dance showed signs of slowing in order to herd it back towards melting like a sheepdog herding sheep. Sharp notes, intermingled with small pauses and leaping sounds like whipcracks, seemed to be what the platinum responded to best.  
  
The original circlet had dissipated entirely by now, and what Harry had was a spiral, in response to his voice, ornamented with small whorls which dizzied the eye when he tried to follow them. He felt a tremor low in his chest, near his lungs, and responded to it with delight. He at last had a pattern he’d been trying to create for some time: one that would cause an entirely illusory experience inside a Muggle’s mind, and send them away with pleasant but bewildered ideas about where they had spent the day. They might spend the rest of their lives searching for a way to recapture the feeling, but Harry thought that no bad thing. It would force some of them to be more industrious, and others to realize that happiness lay in ordinary things far more than it did in material possessions.  
  
He dropped his voice, low and pleading now, and the platinum responded to the loss of volume by hardening in its new shape. Three more notes, fluted between Harry’s parted lips whilst his throat burned, and the thing was done.  
  
And Harry collapsed, lying full-length on the floor of the shed, his chest heaving and his mind pleasantly blank.  
  
At least until Draco’s voice said from behind him, cracking the mood like a stone thrown at a large mirror, “I’ve come to hear the story you were too cowardly to tell me when we broke up.”  
  
*  
  
Draco had to admire, in part of his mind, how swiftly Harry uncoiled from the floor. Draco never saw his knees touch it. He only knew that one moment Harry was sprawled there like some common drunkard, panting, and the next moment he was on his feet, sagging to the side because of his bad leg, and had cornered Draco against the wall. Draco had no time to draw out the parchment and quill.  
  
Suddenly, and without the amount of preparation and effort he had envisioned, Draco found himself close to the mask of Harry’s face. It reminded him of a blasted volcanic landscape. He stared at the gray pits in the midst of the black ridges with a sick fascination, and winced when his eyes lingered on the horn-like projections and sharp points those ridges formed.  
  
He couldn’t get used to it or appreciate the crawling skin all over his body the way he wanted, though, because Harry was storming at him, in a way that caused flecks of spit to leap out of his mouth and stain Draco’s own perfect skin. It _did_ seem that Harry always had to be contaminating him in some way, Draco thought, drawing a hand over his mouth.  
  
“You’ve made it clear that you don’t want me anymore! I was trying to _respect_ that, if you can believe that, and do the job you hired me for whilst I stayed out of sight! I know you think I’m ugly. I know that you only care for the way I used to look, and not for the way I look now. What do you _want_ , Draco? Why the fuck would you still come here? And your accusing me of cowardice, when you could barely look at me last night—that’s rich, that’s fucking rich! Why should I tell you the story of what happened to me or anything else?”  
  
Draco stared at Harry and managed to force his voice out past his lips, as much as he wanted to recoil from the scarred _thing_ being shoved at him. “Because I still have the right to know.”  
  
“The right to—“ Harry shut his eyes for a moment and shook his head, with an expression so weary that Draco hoped he had seen common sense and was about to give in, if only to get rid of Draco the sooner. But when he opened his eyes again, there was still a tiresome flame in them.  
  
“You gave up all rights to me when you walked away,” he said. “Astoria Greengrass is more your taste in lovers, isn’t she? Go back to her, or someone like her, and forget me. You don’t want to share my bed, Draco, and I know now that that was all our relationship ever was to you. So you have no _rights_ —“  
  
“It _wasn’t_!” Draco interrupted, unable to believe that Harry remembered it that way. “I stood up to everyone who wanted to separate us or who thought it would be a good idea if we separated, don’t you remember that? My parents wanted me to marry someone like Astoria from the beginning, and to _stay_ married to her, not to just have a contract to produce a child, the way we did with Scorpius! The papers thought it would make the best story of all if we split up. My friends couldn’t understand what I was doing with you. Compared to theirs, the protests of _your_ friends were small!” He shoved at Harry’s chest and made him stagger a few steps away, which removed that charred landscape from his immediate sight and gave him the chance to catch his breath and think—except that he was too angry to think at the moment. “Would I do that for someone who did nothing more than warm my bed?”  
  
“You’d do it for someone who warmed your bed _first_ ,” said Harry, his voice low and ugly. He folded his arms and glared at Draco. Draco had to reluctantly admit the effectiveness of the glare, which once wouldn’t have frightened him, was increased by his scars. “Once that was gone, everything else we’d built on top of it collapsed.”  
  
“You were still the one who walked away in the end, not me,” Draco retorted. He brushed at his shirt, in case any flakes of dead skin had fallen there.  
  
“Because you called me a monster!”  
  
Harry’s voice was layered with years of hurt. Draco stared at him in astonishment. _He’s that hurt over one slip of the tongue?_   
  
Well, it was fortunate for Draco that he was. It provided Draco with a strategy for winning him back. He ducked his head and smiled up at Harry from beneath his eyelids, making his voice breathy. “I might not think so,” he said, “if you told me the details of what happened to make you look like this.”  
  
Harry stared at him impassively for a few more minutes. Then a smile curved his lips. Draco frowned. It was an unpleasant smile.  
  
“Well, why not?” Harry said, and his voice had become flat and pounded, in a way that made Draco think of the ashes that would need to litter a mountain to make it look like his face. “Why not? You’re absolutely right. You _deserve_ to know.” He turned, rubbing hard at his head, and took a step away.   
  
Silence followed, for so long that Draco thought Harry had forgotten the promise he just made. Then Harry turned back around again and hurled the words at Draco the way he would once have used his wand to hurl a curse.  
  
“They cast spells that turned my entire flesh into sluggish liquid, sometimes,” he said conversationally. “Liquid glass, if you will; the Healers think that’s the best comparison for it. Then they sculptured it into what they wanted and let it harden again.” He tapped one of the ridges above his ears. “This is the result of one of those experiments. I’m just lucky they didn’t get rid of my ears altogether. They discussed it, but Greyback said that they should leave them so I could hear their plans for me.  
  
“They smothered me with my own flesh, once, when they closed off my nostrils and my mouth. Do you want to know what it’s like to lie choking because you can’t breathe, and to know that there’s nothing you can do about it, that your enemies might be able to make you die at any moment?  
  
“And my leg? They conjured lightning bolts and bolts of fire and passed them through my leg. They had specialized spells, Healer’s spells, that let them locate the muscles and the nerves and destroy them one by one. Once they removed several chunks of flesh entirely and left my leg dangling by a strip of skin. But they regrew the skin. Greyback made them.” Harry’s smile flashed for a moment. “He was the leader. He was also the one who decided it would be more— _dramatic_ —to leave my eyes and mouth the way they were. He wanted me to be able to see what was done to me, and scream without restraint.”  
  
Draco had started biting his tongue to choke back the bile some time ago. His entire body was shuddering as if to the beats of a drum he could feel more than he could hear. He wrapped his arms around himself. It didn’t help.  
  
Harry tilted his head to the side. “My magic finally couldn’t take it anymore. That was on the day they were planning to fill Ginny’s spine, slowly, with boiling lead, and see how much she could take before she started to die. And then I was the center of a maelstrom, and when I could see again, I realized that the walls were covered with flesh that had been scrambled and cooked like eggs.”  
  
He stepped towards Draco, his voice dropping to a croon. “That’s what they did to me. That’s what made me into the monster you see before you. Maybe you’re right to call me one, even.” His laughter emerged, a sharp bark that made Draco leap; it sounded like stones clashing together. “Isn’t it only monsters who can slaughter other monsters?”  
  
Draco’s mouth was so dry his tongue stuck to his teeth. He worked it slowly loose, still staring at Harry.  
  
For the first time, he was really focusing on the emotions in those green eyes, and not on the fact that they still existed, more or less perfect, in the middle of devastation. And he wondered how he could never have seen the despair and the rage there before.  
  
 _Harry’s not glad this happened. He’s not reveling in it. I thought he was. I thought he was overjoyed at the chance to be a martyr for something other than his childhood. But he’s angry.  
  
He’s angry the way I would be if this was done to me._  
  
Draco experienced a surge of fellow-feeling that carried pity with it, and anger, and a hunger that grew as he imagined Harry looking, again, the way he would with a glamour over his face. He took a step forwards. Harry’s lips shone in that unpleasant smile again.  
  
“Going to faint on me, Malfoy?” he asked softly, mockingly. “Or going to run away?”  
  
Draco shook his head and took a deep breath. “Neither,” he said. “I—I’ve heard of Dark Arts like those before, Harry. I think there are ways to heal them. Maybe not known to the Healers in Britain, but the Healers in Britain aren’t the only ones in the world. There are excellent ones in Italy who’ve been known to cure wounds that everyone else insisted were untreatable. They won’t see you without a hefty amount of gold, but I can provide that.”  
  
Harry hissed and retreated a step, stumbling over his bad leg as he went. Even that might be curable, Draco thought, the vision of Harry on a broom blazing in his mind.  
  
“I told you, Malfoy. The Healers said—“  
  
“Within the limits of their knowledge, they couldn’t cure the scars,” Draco acknowledged. “But there’s wider knowledge out there. We can look for it. I would do anything to have you back, the way you looked before.” He blinked as he heard the words, then shrugged and forged ahead. They were said, and trying to retract them now would just make him look weak. “Please, Harry, let’s try. I’d be willing to let you live with me whilst we did. You like Scorpius and he likes you, and I do still care for you. Let’s find closure to this in the way we should have long since, by seeking an end to the scars.”  
  
Draco was shaking as he finished the speech, shaking with pride in himself and hope and his dazzling visions of the future. He should have listened to Harry’s story before this, he thought absently. He should have _insisted_ that Harry tell it to him. The things his imagination had conjured were much worse than the reality. These were Dark Arts. Dark Arts could be reversed.  
  
 _Not always_ , whispered his mind, but he refused to listen to it. Listening to it was the kind of thing Harry did.  
  
Harry stared at him, then shook his head.  
  
“You won’t even _try_?” Draco heard his voice rise in a betrayed wail.  
  
“I have to live with reality, even if you don’t,” Harry snapped. “And I’ve—looked. Hermione’s helped me. I think that if there was a solution out there, I would have found it by now.”  
  
“But you can’t have looked everywhere,” Draco argued. “And the Malfoy money opens doors—even the Malfoy name, sometimes. We can try. Say you’ll try.”  
  
Harry turned and limped away instead.  
  
“Why are you always _fucking_ walking away from me?” Draco yelled at his back, his anger surging in him like the beat of brazen wings. “Why won’t you even try?”  
  
Harry turned his head. Anger sparked in his eyes, cutting Draco the way his story hadn’t been able to.  
  
“Because,” Harry said, “you’re not worth it.”  
  
And away he went, leaving Draco to stare after him with his mouth open.  
  
*  
  
Tears burned in Harry’s eyes as he limped to the far side of the shed and out, into the moonlight. The clang of hammers resounded from around him, and the swirl of soot, and the flicker of flames, and he used them to try to anchor himself as he put his hands over his face and breathed deeply.  
  
He wouldn’t listen to Draco. He had put too much effort into accepting the inevitable and coming to peace with himself. All that listening would result in would be a few glittering years where Draco would chatter and investigate the possibilities and hold out a prize, the eventual reconciliation, to Harry—  
  
And then it would come apart when Draco found out there really _was_ no cure, and the names he had already called Harry would seem like nothing compared to the words he would speak then.  
  
Harry shuddered, and then came out of it with a twist of his shoulders that nearly wrenched his bad leg and sent him over backwards.  
  
His friends had tried to warn him against accepting this commission. He should have listened.  
  
To spare Draco’s dreams and sanity as well as his own, he would have to leave now.  
  
 _Let Draco have his perfect life_ , he thought, staring at the manor house without resentment. _His perfect son and his unmarred skin and whatever lovers he wants to take to his bed. He does deserve it, for even trying to make it work a second time._  
  
And he spun and Apparated, wishing he could ignore the feeling in the back of his head that he was running away.


	5. Lamentable

  
  
Thank you again for all the reviews!  
  
 _Chapter Five—Lamentable_  
  
“Wasn’t I right, mate?” Ron nodded enthusiastically to Harry over Rose’s head. Rose was curled up of her father’s lap, currently absorbed in the adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle. She could only read that when Hermione was away from home, as she was now, involved in a protracted case at the Ministry; Hermione thought the books encouraged “dreadful preconceptions.” “Malfoy was exactly the way we always thought he was. He was shallow. He didn’t change at all.”  
  
“You were right,” Harry murmured, and poured a shot of Firewhisky down his throat. He didn’t ordinarily drink so much, but for the moment, he was encouraged by the thought that he had an awful lot to forget.   
  
“Always thinking of himself.” Ron laughed shortly, and then visibly cut himself off from whatever he was about to say next, with an anxious glance at Rose. Harry concealed a smile. Ron would happily give Rose chocolates before dinner and Martin the Mad Muggle to read, but he didn’t want her picking up certain words that she might repeat where Hermione could hear them. “Always locked into his own perfect picture of what the world was like,” Ron went on, in a whisper. “Always certain that you would come crawling back to him because you couldn’t find anyone better.”  
  
Harry scrubbed his tongue around his teeth and wondered if he should tell Ron that he _had_ essentially gone crawling back to Draco, at least to the point of eating dinner at the same table and admitting his own surviving love. But he decided against it. This conflict was between Draco and Harry, and Harry doubted that Draco would ever hear or care for Ron’s opinion. “Yeah,” he said instead, and finished off the bottle of Firewhisky, then Summoned another one.  
  
“Are you going to get drunk?” Rose asked, lifting her head and peering at him. Her eyes were a brilliant brown that could have come from either Hermione’s side of the family or Ron’s, but uncomfortably sharp. Harry was certain that Hermione had never looked at him and Ron with such sharp eyes, even when they were all in Gryffindor and he and Ron were begging to copy Hermione’s notes.  
  
“No,” Harry said, and carefully put the cork down on the table near him. “Why would you think that, sweetheart?”  
  
“It says here,” said Rose, and laid a delicate hand on the pages of her book, “that Martin has to rescue some people from drunk Muggles some of the time. And people drink when they’re angry.” She had a way of pausing at the end of her sentences that Harry was certain Hermione had taught her.   
  
And she sounded like Scorpius, even though she was five and Scorpius was two. Harry swallowed angrily against the recollection and shook his head. “I’ll just drink a _little_ ,” he said. “And I’m not angry. I’m disappointed.”  
  
He blinked when he heard himself say it. It was true, but he had not imagined himself voicing his dissatisfaction in just those words before.  
  
“ _Are_ you?” Ron asked, leaning forwards and blinking at him. “But why, if you agree that he’s all the things I said he was?”  
  
Harry rubbed his tongue around his teeth again, and listened to the crackle and stretch of skin on his cheeks as he did so. His skin behaved oddly even by the standards of flesh cursed with the Dark Arts, the Healers had told him. Sometimes—most of the time—it was inflexible and sharp and simply motionless, meaning that Harry had to do hard labor with his mouth and eyes to show an expression. Other times it pulled and bent as if it were newly burned. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t have expected anything else from him. And yet I do.”  
  
“ _Do_?” Ron’s eyes widened until Harry thought, if he looked into them hard enough, he would be able to see Ron’s brain at the bottom of them.   
  
“Did,” Harry said. “I meant did, of course. There’s no way I would go back to Malfoy Manor to be tormented by him again.”  
  
Ron seemed satisfied with that, and set about asking Rose what part she had reached in the book and chuckling with her over it, answering her serious questions, and inviting Harry to join in the fun with offhand remarks. Harry sat back in his chair and responded absently, whilst his brain ran around and around his skull in quest of an answer.  
  
 _Why should I want more from Draco than he can give me? Why can’t I be satisfied that he’s really as shallow as his own words proclaim, and give up?_  
  
But Harry didn’t know if he was capable of giving up on someone who had once mattered so much to him, and the more the word _disappointment_ tolled against his eardrums, the less he was certain that he could do it now.  
  
 _So the thing to do is keep your distance, of course. Go back tomorrow morning early, to forge the last sigils Morningswood should need, and then leave before he can see you. And no, that doesn’t break your promise to Ron, because you said that you wouldn’t go back to Malfoy Manor again, rather than Morningswood._  
  
Harry winced. The dishonesty made him think himself a sneaking, craven bloke, someone who would mutter technicalities to excuse himself when being led to Azkaban.  
  
But then, his hope in Draco was like that, too: low and sneaking, unworthy of being entertained, but somehow managing to create a place for itself in his soul anyway. Harry thought he would probably continue to feel it for years. The relationship he had had with Draco shouldn’t have worked, and the obstacles it had jumped—disapproval from his friends, the press’s relentless inquiries into their lives, Draco’s own prejudices and Harry’s—made too great an impression in his mind. If they could overcome that, then, the hope whispered, they could overcome this. So Harry felt it.  
  
 _But you don’t have to act on it._  
  
*  
  
Draco didn’t know how long he remained still, staring at the place Harry had stood when he made that mad proclamation, after Harry left. Even when the crack of Apparition reached his ears, he only blinked once and went on staring.  
  
 _I’m not worth it?_  
  
Wonder edged the wound, preventing the pain from fully reaching him. Did Harry really think that? Could the passion Draco had seen in him and heard in his voice really have come to this? Did Draco’s compassion mean nothing?  
  
Was he going to _lose?_  
  
The dread of failure tried to overwhelm him then. Draco shook his head, drew a deep breath, and stood up straight. He was a Malfoy. They didn’t succumb to the most intense pressures. They found a way around them, including pretending humility if they had to—as his father had in front of the Dark Lord, as all of them had in front of Potter’s side after the war—and in the end they got what they wanted. Two days ago, Draco had thought that was freedom and life in peace with his perfect son.  
  
But Scorpius was less than perfect, and Harry could toss words at him that hurt and then walk away, which was _unacceptably_ less than perfect.  
  
Draco shook himself at last and started walking back towards the house, glancing at the forges and the small tents where the dwarves still labored on as he went. He tried to imagine Harry laboring there, and rejected the vision. No, Harry wouldn’t stoop to work like that. And his wounded leg and small arms wouldn’t let him muster the necessary force to swing a hammer. It was magic he was meant for, graceful enchantments like the one Draco had seen him weaving with the metal earlier that evening.  
  
 _Or no work at all. He can live with me whilst we seek a cure to the scars that cover his face._  
  
Draco could _see_ that life, and he never saw anything so clearly that wouldn’t come true. Harry leaned in a chair near the fire, one hand propping up his chin and the other holding a book open so that he could easily see the pages as he mouthed the words to himself. The fire played across his scars and made them look more like the effects of shadows; Harry could change them by shifting. Scorpius would be sitting on the carpet nearby, practicing simple spells and wand motions, and Draco would correct him occasionally. But mostly he would read his own books, and sometimes rise and walk across to Harry, so that he could tangle his fingers in Harry’s hair and sniff the back of his neck to draw in the scent that lingered there.   
  
_From behind, he won’t look so horrible. And I think he rejected the offer I made to try and help him find a cure because he was afraid of trying again. Afraid I would betray him, afraid that we would find a cure and it would hurt. He can’t be afraid of looking in the first place, because he looked with Granger.  
  
He does still want to be healed. He wants to be free of this affliction as strongly as I want him to be free of it. _  
  
Draco’s head came up, and he smiled. Already his heart was beginning to beat with hope again, and he could consider the words Harry had spoken to him and reject them easily.   
  
_He meant I wasn’t worth it only as a slip of the tongue, the same way I called him a monster. Yes, it’s painful. Yes, he shouldn’t have said those words, and I shouldn’t have said that word.  
  
But we didn’t really mean them, and they can be forgotten and forgiven, as long as the person who hears them has the will to do that. I’ll forgive Harry. Then I’ll persuade him to forgive me._  
  
Humming under his breath, Draco stepped into the entrance hall of Morningswood. Not even a house-elf appearing before him and bowing in agitation worried him. After all, Harry might have come back and demanded to see him, and the house-elves would be worried that they didn’t have a guest bedroom already prepared for him. Elves did give Harry the most laughable reverence.  
  
“Master Draco,” the elf squeaked, “Master Scorpius is hurt.”  
  
*  
  
Harry lay with his arms behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. This was the same guest room that he had every time he stayed at Ron and Hermione’s house, and most of the time, its familiarity comforted him. He liked the enchanted window that always showed six scenes—a meadow, a forest, and the ocean by daylight, and then the same ones by moonlight—and the large bed that gave enough support to his scarred leg that he didn’t have to feel that he was walking whilst he lay down. He liked the smell of the sheets, rose petals, because of the household charms that Hermione had made Ron study. He liked the bookshelves, even though the books that filled them were ones Hermione had chosen and Harry couldn’t bring himself to be interested in.  
  
He appreciated the fact that there were no mirrors.  
  
But now he could only think of an older familiarity, the way he had once lain in bed knowing that Draco was in the next room, or with Draco beside him, sprawled on his shoulder, drooling in his hair. Draco had always denied, indignantly, that he drooled. Harry had rolled his eyes and put up with the lie for the sake of keeping the peace in the bedroom.   
  
Now he thought, bitterly, that it was only one more sign that Draco wasn’t able to put up with anything less than perfection. If he couldn’t attain it, he would persuade himself that he had it anyway, or he would ignore the signs that it didn’t exist. And if he couldn’t ignore it, then he would shove the person who reminded him of imperfections violently away.  
  
Harry lifted a hand and touched the skin around his mouth. It had hardened again, and only poked his finger, instead of crackling beneath his touch like pork fat.  
  
He should stop thinking about Draco and go to sleep. Thinking about Draco was to give him more consideration than he deserved.   
  
On the other hand, he argued mentally, he was doing this for his own peace, trying to figure out what about Draco still fascinated him, and it didn’t mean that he would go crawling back to Morningswood with the dawn. He could owl Grishnazk and ask him to send the prepared metal to Ron and Hermione’s house. He would perform the dance here and send the completed sigils back. He could ask Hermione to Apparate with the patterns to the dwarves. He wouldn’t trust Ron not to take the opportunity to march into the house and tell Draco what he really thought of him, but Hermione was steady.  
  
But he didn’t want that. He wanted to go back. He wanted to stare at the house, no matter how much the sight of the walls—the walls that shut out everything imperfect, everything flawed—tormented him.  
  
 _Why?_  
  
Harry sighed and touched his face again. There was only one answer that had ever made sense to him. It was the same answer that had rescued him from despair when he walked away from Draco, and the one that had sent him into the pursuit of metal-dancing.  
  
 _Because even if he’s not worth it—and I’m not sure about that—I am. I have more conscience and a desire to help and to hope. So I’ll exercise it, because that kind of desire is worth exercising._  
  
He needed to be himself. If that meant making excuses for people his friends thought weren’t worthy of excuses, then so be it. He reminded himself that Ron and Hermione had never thought Draco was worthy of him in the first place, even when Draco had gone through fire and water to stay with Harry. Their opinion was understandable, since Draco had tormented them both so much in school and had never been more than polite to them afterwards, but Harry couldn’t make it his own.  
  
 _He broke when the moment came, though. I needed him, and he left. Doesn’t that prove Ron and Hermione were right?_  
  
No, Harry had to admit. He thought he might have broken, too, under similar pressure—  
  
And then he sighed, because if he was going to be honest to himself, he should be honest about everything.  
  
 _No, I wouldn’t have. There are other things that could have made me walk away, but not that. I’m too loyal, as Ron and Hermione will say when they hear about me clinging to Draco. I don’t care enough about beauty, the way Draco does. I don’t care about things being unmarred. When I entered the wizarding world, I was so relieved to find people who accepted me as a friend instead of turning their backs on me that I forgave them all their faults.  
  
But the reason I love Draco is that he’s_ not _me. He has strengths I don’t, faults I don’t. And he has to be left to shine with them, or else I’m forcing him into an unnatural mold and destroying the man I loved in the first place. That self of his was what I loved, that he was himself more strongly than anyone I knew.  
  
What I can’t live with is his disgust towards me, and his pinning all his hopes on a cure. I’ll make it plain to him tomorrow. If he only wants to be with me again because he’s sure I can be healed and look exactly like I used to, then I’ll walk away. He’ll have to live with uncertainty._  
  
Harry hesitated, the thoughts turning over in his mind as numerous and sharp now as the folds on his face.  
  
 _And so will I. I’ll have to accept the idea that something might be able to heal me, and endure the hope, for Draco’s sake._  
  
Harry tried to envision the future stretching before him, and found it hard to imagine. He’d have to fight an endless battle, to maintain hope and patience whilst educating Draco to look beyond looks, and to think of the quest of healing himself seriously, rather than as a diversion to entertain and soothe Draco.  
  
But he didn’t think he knew what life would be like without a battle. Maybe that was part of the reason he had chosen Draco in the first place, and had endured the insults and the prurient curiosity about his injuries instead of hiding himself away. The other things would be too easy, and with all the leisure the lack of fighting would afford, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.  
  
 _You’re probably delusional_ , he told himself.  
  
But he fell asleep smiling—until the sound of the Floo opening called him from slumber.  
  
*  
  
“Master Draco is being angry at Hinky—Hinky is a _bad_ elf, and Hinky knows it, and—“  
  
Draco shut the door, because he couldn’t bear to listen to the elf’s babbling one more minute. A wail and a thump indicated that Hinky had taken to punishing himself by hitting his head against the wall.  
  
And then Draco forgot about him, because he was gazing at his son.  
  
Scorpius lay swaddled in deep green and silver blankets, as if the colors of Slytherin could somehow protect him from what had happened today, an adventure that would not have disgraced a Gryffindor. Across his face ran a diagonal burn, and the hair that clung above his left ear had been singed. Draco could have lived with that. Burns would heal, and there were spells to restore the natural look of skin that had been touched only by fire and not by Dark Arts.  
  
But the right side of his body…  
  
Scorpius had wandered into one of the sheds where dwarves were forging metals, and they had been too occupied in their tasks to notice him. (They should have, Draco raged internally. How could anyone, even a wretched magical creature, not notice the small version of perfection near them?) He had stooped down to examine a fire, and got caught, when he touched an ember, in the loop of one of the spells that the dwarves used to keep the flames hot and give their craft its special polish. The magic had run through his body for perhaps a minute before someone had noticed and managed to stop the pounding in time to get Scorpius away and carry him to Morningswood.  
  
Draco gently moved the blankets back so that he could stare. Scorpius was deep in a healing sleep that the elves had cast on him the moment they had seen how bad the damage was; Draco knew that he wouldn’t disturb him.  
  
Scorpius’s neck was twisted, turned into a slender column of bone and flesh that couldn’t support his head. His right hand had suffered the same process, the fingers fused and melted together as if by a far greater heat than they had in fact endured—or than they should have been able to endure without burning to ash altogether. The right side of his face had turned into a fried mess, which continually shed drops of blood and juice like dripping fat. Draco didn’t know what it would look like when it cooled, but if it looked better than Harry’s face, it would only be by chance.  
  
 _Harry._  
  
The thought of him brought Draco to his feet. He had not yet summoned Healers, too stunned by what had happened to his son and how the vision of perfection had changed in an hour into a vision of ugliness.  
  
 _All because you would cast spells that made him smarter, able to get out of the house and evade the elves when they looked for him._  
  
But Draco had no time for self-blame right now. He had latched on to Harry. Harry, who was burned in a similar manner. Harry, who must know about dwarves’ fire because he had worked with them, and whose opinion Draco would trust more than he would the fine things the dwarves might say to get themselves out of trouble.  
  
Harry, who still seemed to care for him.  
  
Draco knew he would have gone to his friends’ house, as surely as he drew breath. Harry sought out company when he was suffering extreme pains, however much he might brood over minor ones. And Draco still had the Granger-Weasleys’ Floo address.  
  
He tore out of the room, shouting for the elves.  
  
*  
  
Harry never knew how he did half of what he did that night.  
  
First, he had to soothe Ron and Hermione and reassure them that Draco’s intrusion was not really as unwelcome as it might have appeared. They slowly went back to bed, Hermione looking steadily at Harry in the way that said she would demand an explanation later. Harry could put up with that, because she also had a tight grip on Ron’s arm that kept him from saying anything to Draco.  
  
Second, he had to hold Draco firmly in his arms and shake him until he stopped babbling and told what had happened to Scorpius in plain words. Then he had to say that he knew very little about dwarves’ magical fire, and Draco should get Scorpius to St. Mungo’s. But Draco was so insistent that he at least come and look at Scorpius first that Harry agreed.  
  
Third, he had to keep from vomiting for pure pity when he looked at the damage the fire had wrought to Scorpius’s body. _Magic_ , he remembered thinking, the words fluttering through his mind. _What good is it when it creates damage like this instead of healing it? And I don’t think the Healers will be able to help him._  
  
Fourth, he had to look at Draco and say firmly, “I think there’s some hope. But we need to get him to St. Mungo’s _now_.”  
  
Fifth, he had to go ahead, at Draco’s express request, and call for a Healer whilst asking that a private room be prepared for Scorpius so that no one needed to see him come in. Draco was sensitive to what gossip would say.  
  
Sixth, Harry had to practically shove Draco into the Floo carrying Scorpius; Draco was afraid that because one kind of magical fire had harmed Scorpius, another might. Harry had to take a deep breath, and understand the anxiety, and convince Draco to go through the flames by thrusting a hand into them himself.  
  
Seventh, he had to contact Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy and tell them what had happened to Scorpius, and give as many details as he could in a cold and unflinching voice, whilst Lucius wept without tears and Narcissa without sound.  
  
Eighth, he had to go to Morningswood, reassure the dwarves that he would prevent Draco from attacking them in words or in the papers or with magic, and order them home until he was able to resume his own work with the protective patterns.  
  
And finally, he stood and stared at Morningswood under the moonlight for long moments, searching for the strength in himself to help Draco—and Scorpius—through this trial whilst still unsure if Draco would inflict the same rejection on his son that he had on Harry.  
  
 _He won’t. He loves Scorpius.  
  
But I thought the same thing about his emotion for me. And maybe he loves beauty more._  
  
Harry shook his head and Apparated to London, his bad leg sending spasms of pain up to rack his spine.  
  
 _I have to be strong for him. For him and Scorpius both._  
  
The thought that followed that one crept unwelcome into his mind, and if it hadn’t been for Harry’s newfound honesty, he wouldn’t have permitted himself to listen to it at all.  
  
 _I just wish someone could be strong for me._


	6. Feats of Might and Will

  
“Dwarves’ magical fire—cooked the nerves of the body—meant for beating metal—never meant to touch a human—“  
  
Those were the words that exploded past Draco’s ears like fireworks as he sat at his son’s bedside and stared down at Scorpius. When he could, he held his son’s uninjured left hand. Once he had reached across to hold the right one, but the shiny and slimy skin of the fused fingers made him drop it again and rub his own fingers together.  
  
“Don’t think we can—no, there’s a spell that we can try—really?—yes, read it about it once in Crabtree—“  
  
The words sometimes burst on his mind like fireworks, too, and more than once he was on the point of jerking his head up and asking one of the Healers who swirled around him if they were true, if there was nothing that could be done for Scorpius. But he always gave up again and went back to looking at his son, imagining all the things that he wouldn’t be able to do in the future, all the adaptations that Draco himself would have to make.  
  
The Healers hadn’t yet disturbed the sleep the elves had put him into; they seemed to be afraid to. That didn’t augur good things. Perhaps he would never be able to use the hand again, but, knowing the Malfoy family’s reputation for perfection and beauty, the Healers were afraid to tell Draco so. Perhaps he would never be able to lift his head.  
  
Perhaps his face would always be marred, and Scorpius would even come to accept that, and never remember that once he had looked normal.  
  
Draco heard himself snarling from a distance. No. He could not _accept_ that. He would enable Scorpius to look normal again.  
  
But beautiful? Could he enable that?  
  
He didn’t know. The certainty of his life had been shattered the way that a tsunami sweeping into Morningswood would have shattered the walls and left the stones sinking. Draco was sinking himself. He had to make decisions, he had to prepare himself for the worst and think about how he could help Scorpius, but he didn’t know how.  
  
He had never had to face something like this. All his life, he had been able to run away from the pressing, insistent truths of the world when they came too ugly. After the war, he and his family had withdrawn into Malfoy Manor for a time and lived only on food prepared by their house-elves—and thus verifiably without poison—and exercised only in their close and tightly-warded gardens. When he had seen the horror and ruin Harry’s face had become, he had run away, and he had managed to find Astoria in the next month. He had had a slight fear that their child might be born ugly, because some of the Greengrass relatives were cow-faced, but even that had not come to pass.  
  
Draco had begun to believe that fortune favored him, and close contact with bad luck meant he wouldn’t catch it.  
  
But he would have given everything for this particular luck to have fallen on and infected _him_ , instead of Scorpius.  
  
He was leaning forwards, not sure whether he was going to lie down on the bed with Scorpius or faint, when an arm curved around his shoulders and a voice whispered to him, “It’s all right, I’m here, it’s—“  
  
Draco turned towards Harry, seized him, buried his face in the nearest available shoulder, and wept.  
  
*  
  
Harry had finally managed to soothe Draco to sleep, and now he sat in a chair at the side of Scorpius’s bed. The Healers had objected, at first, about someone who wasn’t related to the patient spending the night in the room, and had wanted even to remove Draco, but Harry had lifted his head and glared at them. The sight of his face made them shut up and then scurry to offer every possible courtesy to Harry Potter.  
  
 _That’s another thing Ginny taught me_ , Harry thought, resting his wrinkled chin on top of Draco’s hair. _To use my name when I have to, to win what privacy I can and wield the power to preserve the privacy of others._  
  
The protective distraction fell away, and Harry had to face the thoughts he’d been avoiding since Draco came through the Floo into Ron and Hermione’s house.  
  
Scorpius was scarred, perhaps irreparably. Draco would need help to recover from that, and to ensure that he didn’t reject his son. And Scorpius would need help learning how to live in a world that worshipped beauty, if not as strongly as Draco did, and tried to reject anyone who looked different.  
  
Harry was the best candidate for teaching him that, perhaps the only one with the power to do so who would _want_ to do it.  
  
So he would work to help people. That wasn’t so different from what he’d done during the war or since, though most of the time the people he was trying to help with metal-dancing were Muggles rather than wizards. The sigils might protect wizarding estates, but the long-term effect of that was less brain damage among Muggles. And there had been a time—just yesterday—when Harry was content with that, and required no more concrete reward than the money his employers paid him, which he mostly used for paying the dwarves and buying new materials to make more protective patterns.  
  
Now, though, he felt as strong a reluctance to take up Draco and Scorpius’s cause as he felt a compulsion to do so.  
  
 _And why?_  
  
Because there would be nothing just for him in it. Even if Draco learned to love him again, it would be because of obligation, and not on the noble and high-minded footing Harry had been dreaming of earlier that night. Of course Harry wouldn’t talk to Draco about _having_ to accept that maybe no cure for Harry’s scars existed. Of course Harry wouldn’t have the luxury of walking away from him if he refused to accept that.  
  
He was chained by compassion and necessity, and he could foresee times when he would hate his new life.  
  
Harry closed his eyes wearily and rubbed his face with his free hand, the one that wasn’t tucked around Draco’s shoulders and under his chin. He was thinking nonsense. He shouldn’t be so selfish. He should rejoice in the chance to be around Draco, to hold him like this, without the other man flinching away from him automatically.  
  
But the feelings remained, churning into a small chunk of ice in the back of his mind. He was dissatisfied with what had happened to Scorpius—and horrified, and unbearably sad—because of what it would mean for him.  
  
He would bear it because he had to. He would bear it because both Scorpius and Draco would need him, and Harry would dare and do anything to keep Draco’s relationship with his son from souring the way that Draco’s relationship with him had. But the dream he had fashioned in his bed that night was dead, and the plea he had shaped in his mind before coming to hospital futile. He would never have a chance at a true and unfettered bond with Draco; he would never have someone to be strong for him.  
  
*  
  
Draco opened his eyes and sat up slowly. He was confused. For long hours, he thought, hours when he had drifted in and out of consciousness, he had sat close to a strong body that wrapped its warmth around him. And now that warmth had been stripped from him, and he sat alone and cold in a chair next to Scorpius’s bed.  
  
“Daddy?”  
  
Scorpius was _awake._  
  
Draco reached out and gripped both his son’s hands this time, his disgust at the feeling of burned skin overcome by the thought that Scorpius needed him. Scorpius blinked at him and turned his head fretfully from side to side, as if looking for his familiar bed and the house-elves of Morningswood. Then he focused on Draco again and said, “Daddy, I’m hurt.”  
  
“I know.” Draco swallowed through a throat that felt clogged with sand. “But we’ll try to heal you, Scorpius, I promise.”  
  
“Try?” Scorpius’s brow had bent, across the burn and the roasted part of his face, as though he had no idea what the words meant. Draco swallowed again. He could—sometimes—look at the right half of Scorpius’s face now, and the magical fire had made it a mask of charred bone, hanging black strips, and what looked like a cauldron of ashes and fat. It looked like Harry’s face, in fact, except that Harry’s face was sharper and projected more; Scorpius’s was bowl-shaped, the destruction contained.   
  
“They don’t know if they can heal it.” Draco wondered if he should speak more tender words, but Scorpius had been intelligent enough to injure himself in the magical fire (that was Draco’s fault, too, if distantly). “They said that they’ll try, but they—“  
  
“They know they can heal his neck.”  
  
Draco spun around, his heart leaping in a great bound of sudden joy. Harry stood in the doorway of the room. He nodded to Draco and then focused on Scorpius, coming over to the bed and kneeling down. He showed no astonishment or anger or disgust at being so close to such a ruined face, Draco marveled. Of course, maybe looking at his own in the mirror had given him practice, but still. It was more than Draco himself could have done.  
  
“Your neck was more distant from the fire,” Harry told Scorpius in a soft, clear tone that had not a trace of pity in it, “because you were bending down and gripping an ember in your hand, and so your face and your hand came in more direct contact with it. They know that you’ll hold your head up again.”  
  
Scorpius lay still, considering that. Then he said, “I want a mirror.” His words slurred a little at the end, and he put out his tongue to probe curiously at the split and blackened remnant of the right corner of his upper lip.  
  
“No!” Draco said sharply. God knew what would happen if his son saw what he looked like right at the moment. Harry could have borne it—he was an older man and a hero—but Scorpius was too young.  
  
“I want one,” Scorpius insisted. “I have to see what I look like.”  
  
“But why?” Draco bent closer to his son, raising one hand to touch his face. But his fingers halted a few inches short of Scorpius’s cheek. He tried to force himself to move closer, and physically couldn’t. “It’s not pleasant. Trust your Father when he says that and think about something else for right now.”  
  
“I brought a pain potion,” said Harry. “You were hurting, I think you said.”  
  
Draco flushed, angry with himself for forgetting about that. Harry put a hand behind Scorpius’s head and supported him so that he could sit up enough to drink the potion. Draco watched anxiously as he gulped it. At least he appeared able to swallow without difficulty; it seemed that the magic must have affected mostly the ability of his neck to support his head, instead of his throat.  
  
And then Harry conjured a mirror and held it up so that Scorpius could see his face in it. Draco’s outraged shriek and snatch at the corner of the glass came too late. Harry simply shifted so that one of his shoulders blocked Draco’s hand and tilted his head so that his cheek almost brushed Draco’s fingers. Though Draco thought he had earlier touched Harry without flinching, he couldn’t do it now, and he froze.  
  
Scorpius stared at his face. Then he lifted his hand and traced the edge of his dented cheekbone, which formed the edge of the cauldron of simmering flesh. Draco had to look away because he couldn’t bear the expression on his son’s face. He was quiet, calculating, as if he were trying to think of what part the stranger in the mirror would play in his own life.  
  
“This is you,” said Harry. “And I can tell you now that it’s no good hoping for a mirror that lies, or one that flatters you with pretty visions of what can never be. You can use glamours; you can research healing spells. Some of the Healers who talked to me are hopeful about eventually restoring some of the skin. But your face will always bend a little to the side even in their best projections, and they don’t think they can do anything about your hand, which was the worst burned because it was holding the ember. Learn reality.” His hand trembled where it clutched the mirror, or Draco would have struck him for his flat, cold, emotionless tone. “It’s the only way to become acquainted with the worst that can happen to you.”  
  
Scorpius still said nothing. Draco finally managed to overcome his own shock, and took the mirror away. Then he grabbed Harry’s arm and hauled him to the far side of the room, making him stumble over his bad leg but not caring. How _dare_ Harry act as if Draco had given him permission to talk to Scorpius like that?  
  
“What was that?” he hissed, his voice shaking. “Why would you say things like that? Just because you had something bad happen to you doesn’t mean it’s going to be that bad for Scorpius.”  
  
“I talked to the Healers, I said.” Harry’s voice was remote and cold as the moon hovering outside the bedroom window. “And that was what they said. Most of them are hopeful about restoring bits of Scorpius’s face, but they can’t agree on which bits. That says to me that they don’t really know what to do about the magical burns. They had the same kinds of disagreements about my leg, and eventually most of them had to drop their optimistic theories and go with the pessimistic ones. And his hand is a dead loss.” For a moment, he turned his head and looked at Scorpius, and Draco could have hit him with pleasure then, because of the look in his eyes. “There are spells and devices he can use to somewhat compensate, but he’ll have to learn to use his wand with his left hand.”  
  
“You don’t need to _tell_ him that—“  
  
Harry whirled on him, and Draco saw the passion he had been missing behind his eyes then, fury and fear colliding in a crash like the lightning of two opposing storms. “I am trying to tell him the truth,” Harry hissed. “And I am _trying_ to save your relationship with him. You can have false assumptions about me all you like. But not him. He’s _your son_. Your _son_ , Draco.” His voice sank, shaking. “I want you to always be able to have him, even if you can’t have me.”  
  
Draco stared at him with his mouth slightly open for long moments. Then he shook his head and said, “You think I would abandon Scorpius?”  
  
Harry leaned towards him, and his breath traveling in soft puffs across Draco’s earlobe roused entirely inappropriate memories. “I saw you didn’t want to look at him or touch his hand. It could begin that way. And I remember that you wanted to stand by me at first, until you learned just how bad the damage was. I won’t _let_ him experience that.”  
  
Draco’s breath caught in his throat. Harry’s head was uplifted, and his eyes shone the way they had when he was relating the story of his torture, so that the important thing was the feelings reflected in them and not the devastated face that surrounded them. Harry would challenge the forces of prejudice and pity and Draco’s own instinctive revulsion in the face of ugliness for Scorpius’s sake—for the sake of a boy he hadn’t even known a week ago.  
  
“You say that your main gift is accepting reality, but really, you’re all about challenging it,” he murmured.  
  
Harry twitched a little, and then said, “I was trying to be cold and calm because I thought that was the only way Scorpius would listen to me. And I need you to realize the truth about him, even if you won’t about me. Look at what he’s become and love him anyway. He needs to have at least one person who he knows won’t turn against him, Draco.”  
  
“It sounds like he has two.” Draco was edging nearer, hardly aware that he was doing so. He didn’t think that he could touch Harry, not yet, but he wanted to be as close as possible to the fire that blazed through Harry’s words and gaze. Yes, there was a good reason that his mouth and eyes had been left undamaged, Draco thought. They were the conduits of the real beauty he still possessed.  
  
 _How can I help but love anyone who fights for Scorpius?_  
  
Harry stared at him for long moments, then turned his head away. Draco was astonished to see his eyes close and to hear him take a breath as if he were fighting back tears. “Yes,” he murmured. “He does.”  
  
“Harry?” Draco reached out to touch his shoulder—it was so much easier when he had that dreadful face turned away—but Harry stepped away from him without appearing to notice his hand and knelt down in front of Scorpius. Scorpius turned his head and looked up at him. Even the burned skin on his face looked pale, Draco thought.  
  
“You’ve had some time to think about it,” said Harry. “I know you’re smarter than most other kids your age. What do you think?”  
  
“I think,” said Scorpius, “that I can count.”  
  
Harry blinked, and Draco was momentarily glad that he had someone else who showed he was bewildered by Scorpius with him. It was a matter of pride with his parents to never show surprise or any other emotion to the little boy but patience and, when Scorpius earned it, affection.  
  
 _I’m thinking about Harry as if I need him._  
  
Draco shivered, and swallowed, and made an admission he probably should have made years ago in the privacy of his own head. _I do._  
  
“Count?” Harry said, and his voice was helpless. He tilted his head to the side and looked at Scorpius as if he were the first being of a new magical species Harry had ever met. One of his hands had fallen to his side, Draco saw, massaging his bad leg. “Of course you count. You matter to both your father and me.” He darted Draco a venomous sidelong glance that said Scorpius had _better_ matter to him.  
  
“Yes, count,” said Scorpius. “I still have one hand that’s fine.” He looked complacently at his left hand. “That means I can pick up things. And my mouth is fine, so I can talk and cast magic and eat sweets. And the Healers will help my neck. And I have two sides of my face, and one isn’t burned.” He looked quizzically up at Harry, who was gaping at him. “What’s wrong with you? Do you need a healing potion and to lie down, too? You look like you hurt.”  
  
*  
  
Harry swallowed, and swallowed again. He had no other means of fighting back the tears, because blinking wasn’t strong enough to do it.  
  
And then the tears came anyway, making their way slowly down the cracked and twisted seams of his face.  
  
 _Draco still needs me only to care for Scorpius. I’ll never have him as a lover again, I have to acknowledge that now. If he can barely touch his son without flinching, what makes me think he’ll able to touch me?  
  
But Scorpius is taking this better than I expected. He’ll—he’ll heal. He’ll heal in his mind, which is so much more important than the body._  
  
Harry lifted a hand and wiped away his tears, hearing flakes of dead skin break off at his touch and rattle down like the bodies of crushed insects. He finally managed to open his eyes and look at Scorpius normally, and he said, “I’m in pain, but it’s the happy kind of pain you get when you—“  
  
“When you eat too much ice cream,” Scorpius interrupted, nodding wisely. “I get that all the time.” He looked thoughtfully at Harry for another moment. “Can I have another pain potion?”  
  
“Not right now.” Harry knew the potion he’d given Scorpius had a soporific component. He should be falling asleep soon.  
  
“Oh.” Scorpius wrinkled his nose and seemed about to say something else, but then his eyes closed and he began to faintly snore. Harry reached out and gently stroked the fused-together fingers of his right hand before he turned away. The Healers might have more concrete information on Scorpius’s condition now than they’d managed to give him last time.  
  
Draco stepped in front of him. Harry blinked, lost again for a moment. How in the world had Draco got in front of him?  
  
But then he saw the pale face and the compressed lips, and he knew. Draco had always had a habit of moving faster when he was angry.  
  
“I want to know why you pulled away from me just now,” Draco said, in a crisp voice that made it not much less than a demand. “What reason do you have to mourn, when Scorpius is taking this so well?”  
  
“None,” Harry said, and gave him a watery smile. “Absolutely none. I just thought he wouldn’t, that’s all. And I’m glad he has so much strength. You must have raised him exceptionally well,” he added.  
  
Draco flushed and coughed. But then he said, “That isn’t it. Surprise and worry about Scorpius shouldn’t make you snap at _me_.”  
  
Harry raised an eyebrow, or at least arched the ridge of his forehead where his eyebrows would once have been. What he said next _insisted_ on coming out, no matter how sternly he told himself to keep his emotions in check. “Believe it or not, Draco, even monsters have human emotions sometimes, and get frustrated at people who don’t deserve it, like everyone else.”  
  
Draco’s eyes narrowed. “I told you that calling you a monster was a mistake. Can’t you—“  
  
 _Oh, God_. Harry knew that he couldn’t have this conversation, or everything would come tumbling out, including the whole flood of his bitterness. And Draco might not be Scorpius, but he was still Scorpius’s father, and he was suffering. The last thing he needed right now or ever was an overload of Harry’s pain.  
  
“I’ll forgive it eventually,” he said. “I brooded on it for three years, and then I learned that maybe I was wrong. I can’t just forget that in a day.” He hastily nodded to the bed where Scorpius lay sleeping and changed the subject. “I’m going to see what else they can tell me about his condition. Maybe someone will come up with a way to save his hand after all.”  
  
Draco didn’t move. In fact, he planted his hands on his hips and gave Harry a distinctly unimpressed look. Harry’s heartbeat quickened. Once that look had been prelude to a lecture on hiding from the press or an announcement about how he wasn’t going to meekly accept an insult one of Harry’s friends had flung at him. Petulant, bratty, and obnoxious as some sides of Draco’s character were, other parts of it gave him the strength to stand up to anything.  
  
 _Except me_ , Harry thought, and touched his face again.  
  
“Is this about you and me?” Draco asked, lowly. “Scorpius won’t be sick forever. And I don’t see why we can’t combine the search for a cure for _his_ injuries with the search for a cure for _yours_.”  
  
It was too much like what Harry wanted. For a moment, he was tempted to surrender, to give in and live the life Draco was offering. He’d had so much trouble envisioning it earlier that night, but he could see it now: sitting in front of the fire whilst Scorpius practiced with his wand in his left hand not far away, Draco sitting in the chair next to him and dividing his attention between his son and the book spread open across the chair arms and Harry himself—  
  
And the dream destroyed itself. Harry looked up at Draco. “I made up my mind tonight to give you an ultimatum,” he said. “If you can’t accept that maybe my injuries are permanent and we won’t find a cure, then I can’t be with you. I would only end up being more disappointed if we had to give up.”  
  
“I don’t think they _are_ permanent,” Draco said at once. “I think that someday you’ll look just like you do with the glamour on.”  
  
Harry moved his fingers in a controlled spasm at his side, and the glamour took over his features again. “Like this?” he asked softly.  
  
Draco stepped towards him at once, his movements swift and yet dreamy, as if he didn’t really realize what he was doing. He closed his eyes and leaned towards Harry, hands rising to cup the sides of his face.  
  
Harry twitched his fingers again and Vanished the glamour.  
  
Draco jumped back at once as if he had been burned, but Harry caught one of his hands and pressed it against the horned ridge that stuck up on his right cheek, let him feel the roughness and the edge that would cut him if not for the other spells Harry had already applied to his face. Draco struggled in a panic, the way Ron still reacted if a spider appeared, and lunged to the other side of the room the moment Harry let him go. He was rubbing his hands together frantically, his eyes locked in horrified fascination on Harry’s face.  
  
“There,” Harry said. It felt as though a great crystal he had carried safely in his hands for years were breaking apart at last, but the feeling was weirdly relieving. _Once the crystal breaks, maybe I’ll be able to look at the sun directly, instead of through it_. “You can accept Scorpius the way he really is and love him no matter what, but not me. You can’t love me unless I’m beautiful. And there’s a very high chance that I might not be, Draco. I won’t—I won’t be your lover on a condition. I deserve unconditional love as much as the next person. I deserve someone who can actually give me strength as well as count on mine.”  
  
His voice was shaking wildly by the end of the speech, but he knew he had said something important.   
  
He added, just so that Draco couldn’t mistake him, “I won’t abandon you or Scorpius. I’ll see this through. But, like you said, Scorpius won’t be sick forever. And when he isn’t, it’s best if I just go.”  
  
He limped out of the room, away from the horror-stricken look on Draco’s face.  
  
*  
  
Draco buried his face in his hands.  
  
The revelation he had now didn’t help him come to terms with what had just happened. It didn’t make him able to overcome his revulsion. It was as hard and spiky and unpleasant as the touch of Harry’s skin. And he felt distant anger and irritation and helplessness.  
  
But now, finally, he _understood_ what his rejection had done to Harry.  
  
And now, finally, he was feeling pain and grief that were not his own, and were not based solely on the loss of beauty.  
  
And, given his earlier revelation that he needed Harry, that gave him rather a lot to think about.


	7. In the Name of Forgiveness

  
The problem with a revelation like the one of Harry’s pain, Draco thought, was that having it did not tell him what he should _do_ with it.  
  
He stood and watched as Harry conferred with his parents, who had arrived in hospital with cheering words and quiet offers of Dark magic to try and repair Scorpius’s hand and face. Harry received them with frigid politeness, and only shook his head when Lucius made a motion with his wand. The same aura that surrounded him when he was metal-dancing surrounded him now, Draco thought. He was the center of a corona of constantly shifting power. If he chose to use that power against the Malfoy family instead of to shape and forge protective sigils, there would be little that any of them could do to stop him.  
  
Luckily, Lucius recognized that fact as well as Draco did, and Narcissa was more interested in what the Healers had actually said than in what they could do to help their grandson recover--so far. They both listened meekly to Harry and then stepped forwards and stood, hand in hand, staring down at Scorpius, who snored with his mouth open. Harry folded his arms and leaned against the wall, his face as implacable in emotion as it was in ugliness.  
  
Draco looked back and forth between them and felt both his old revulsion for Harry’s features as compared with his parents’ noble and proud ones and impatience with himself for making the comparison. He had to get beyond this somehow, at least if he wanted Harry to remain with him the way he was certain both he and Scorpius needed Harry to remain.  
  
But _how_?  
  
Lucius and Narcissa had taught Draco to put up with stupid allies, with people who thought they were more cunning than he was, and with those who thought they could use Draco to advance without paying a price in return. But they had never taught him to adapt to the repulsive. Why should they? No pure-blood, by common agreement, was ugly, and Draco would spend his life among pure-bloods.  
  
Draco blew out air through pursed lips and shifted his stance thoughtfully from foot to foot. It was looking more and more likely that he would just have to react to Harry blindly and hope for the best.  
  
But he didn’t like the idea.  
  
If he could only have a _plan_ …  
  
*  
  
Harry shot a cautious glance at Draco. He seemed to have become a mere spectator to the fate of his son, watching his parents and Harry hold a discussion about what magic would be best to use far more than he contributed to it, and keeping his eyes on them more often than on Scorpius.  
  
His expression was complex, angry and indignant and thoughtful by turns. Harry didn’t know if much was to be hoped for out of him.  
  
He swallowed and turned back to the small boy who needed him now, whatever his father’s opinion of Harry was. Scorpius had awakened again and was wincing softly in pain, shifting his shoulders around on the pillows, apparently afraid to actually cry out. Harry stepped towards him and offered another pain potion that the Healers had given him. Scorpius accepted it graciously and drank it without a pause.  
  
“Is that safe?” Narcissa Malfoy asked sharply.  
  
Harry had trouble deciding how to react to Draco, but no trouble deciding how to react to the elder Malfoys. He knew they were worried for Scorpius’s safety, but they remained as obnoxious as ever. “Yes, Mrs. Malfoy,” he said, and didn’t look at her. He would rather she didn’t see the open contempt shining in his eyes. Instead, he watched Scorpius press back into the pillows again and look around the room. “The Healers cast several spells to make sure that Scorpius wouldn’t react to any of the potion’s ingredients, and this potion has been used safely before with victims of dwarf magic.”  
  
“Victims.”  
  
Harry narrowed his eyes and glanced over his shoulder. Lucius had spoken, and there was a look on his face like a man who sees sunrise after a night of despair.  
  
“Of course Scorpius is a victim of dwarf magic,” Lucius said slowly, his tongue sneaking out to tap his lips and said lips curling up in a venomous smile. “I should have thought of that before. They foolishly allowed him to enter their work zones and touch their power. They should have kept an eye out for a human child whom they must know would be curious about the non-human. Perhaps they even deliberately injured Scorpius. The dwarves must have been envious of the beauty that Scorpius carried and wanted to mar it.” He bobbed his head in a way, Harry thought in disgust, that made him look like a duck waiting for a handout. “Yes, we will be _seeing_ about the dwarves.”  
  
“Mr. Malfoy.” Harry stood straight, or as straight as he could with his bad leg, and pivoted towards Lucius. “This was an accident--one that would not have happened in the first place if Scorpius had not been smart enough to evade the house-elves. No one deliberately hurt your son.”  
  
“You can’t know that.” Lucius gave him a look compounded of smugness and pity. “Who can really understand the mind of a non-human?” Harry started to snap that Lucius himself had already made a claim to second-guess their motives, but the idiot was rambling obliviously on. “And besides, they’re your colleagues. Of course you would defend them. But we can’t rely on your testimony alone.”  
  
Harry felt a dragon-like rage rearing up in him. He had been through something like this before, when the Healers who were treating him after his torture made assumptions about what he wanted and about his state of mind. If he had to go through it again with the Malfoys, he would--  
  
“They didn’t hurt me on purpose.”  
  
Harry let the anger fade out of him and turned to look at Scorpius. Scorpius was holding his head up slightly now--the Healers had begun to cast the spells that would thicken the flesh and muscle on his neck--and looking patiently from one of his grandparents to the other. His fused hand made slow, intense gestures, like the flipper of a seal.  
  
“What?” Lucius demanded. He sounded just as arrogant as he had when confronting Harry. _Perhaps he doesn’t save that condescension just for me, then_ , Harry decided, _but for anyone who contradicts him._  
  
“They didn’t hurt me on purpose,” Scorpius repeated firmly. He turned to Harry and extended his fused hand without a pause. Harry took it and folded it neatly in his own. He had to blink back tears. Scorpius seemed to know that Harry wouldn’t hesitate to touch him, whilst his own family’s record on that wasn’t impeccable. “I just wanted to see what was going on, and I waited until the dwarves were all busy. Then I picked up the ember. And the fire came.” He looked solemnly at Narcissa; he seemed to dislike Lucius’s expression instinctively. “The fire hurt me. They didn’t hurt me.”  
  
“Dear child, you might have been mistaken--”  
  
A sound so loud that at first Harry mistook it for the crackle of one of the scars along his leg resounded throughout the room. And then he realized it was Draco, clearing his throat and stepping away from the wall. He looked profoundly uncomfortable, but he still did it.  
  
“Scorpius is right,” Draco said. “You know exactly why what happened did. You know why Scorpius was clever enough to slip out of the house without any of the elves noticing and make his way to the forge. And you know why he was curious enough to pick up the ember, and overrule the instincts that would have told him the fire was hot.” He closed his eyes and let his breath out slowly. “I think this was mostly an accident, but if it was anyone’s fault, it was ours.”  
  
Harry would have liked to say something then, but he couldn’t, because of the surprise and the pleasure choking up from his heart and filling his throat.   
  
And to see Draco _face_ his parents, his pulse throbbing rapidly in his throat and his hands closed into fists at his sides…  
  
Harry leaned back, still holding Scorpius’s hand, and prepared to watch.  
  
*  
  
Draco didn’t like doing this. His parents were looking at him as if he had lost his mind--less for supporting Scorpius’s word, he knew, than for mentioning family secrets in front of Harry or defending non-humans. But even though he still didn’t really know what to do with his new empathy for Harry, he knew this was a good first step.  
  
And besides, Scorpius was right. And he would feel more guilty if he stood around and tried to conceal the reason he was right than if he opposed Lucius and Narcissa, which he had done before and survived. And he didn’t like feeling guilty.  
  
“Draco,” Lucius said at last, his voice a measured pulse of anger. It was a highly effective, intimidating technique. There had been a time when he could make Draco quail with just that voice and a direct look. Of course, he seemed to have forgotten that Draco was no longer ten years old. “You know our reasons for those actions, and you know the promise we made each other.”  
  
 _Never to mention the spells to anyone else_. Draco knew. Whilst most of the spells were not technically illegal, it _was_ illegal to use them on anyone under eleven years old, when a wizarding child’s brain was considered mature enough to handle them. But Harry was not an Auror and never would be, and Draco thought that trusting him was not out of the question. He swallowed once and said, “I wouldn’t say anything about it if you weren’t blaming the dwarves unfairly, Father. But you are.”  
  
“Draco.” Narcissa knew, and her gentler, more chiming voice could have melted Draco’s resolve if it was malleable. She reached out and laid a hand on his arm, gently stroking up the underside. Her nails left a tingling line of sharpness behind. “Most of us are family here.”  
  
 _And family loyalty always comes first_. But Draco could imagine what would happen if he adhered to that precept now. Harry would become defensive about the dwarves and his metal-dancing--understandably, since a lawsuit by the Malfoys could sink his company--and Draco would lose all chance of reconnecting with him. Besides, Draco didn’t think that denying his father the opportunity to go to court was tantamount to a betrayal.   
  
Still, it was something he had never done before. His parents had given him support and sympathy in the wake of Harry’s torture; they were the only ones who had listened to _his_ side of the story and agreed that he had done the right thing. Under normal circumstances, Draco would have given them what they wanted without hesitation.  
  
“I don’t care,” he said. His throat felt stuffed with cotton or straw. He turned to Harry. “We cast spells to make Scorpius smarter than his age would technically allow,” he said harshly. “It’s one reason he listened to his intelligence above his instincts and picked up that ember in the first place.”  
  
Harry leaned back for a moment, his eyes gone dark. Lucius’s face closed, and he stepped away from Draco, folding his arms in a gesture of negation. Narcissa remained where she was, gaze traveling slowly between her husband and her son, but Draco saw no support in her firmly planted feet.  
  
He was caught between the lover he hoped to win and the parents he still had to please, since Lucius’s money was what Draco and Scorpius lived on. He had to do this alone--perhaps as alone as Harry had been when he was lying in hospital after his torture. He swallowed and kept on soldiering straight ahead.   
  
“I love my son,” he told Harry. “I never would have allowed the spells if I thought they would harm him. But I love my family name, too, and I couldn’t allow Scorpius to be--average in any way. I’m just glad he was beautiful, so we didn’t have to use any spells to enhance his appearance. Spells that work the flesh and bone are more dangerous than ones that affect the mind, sometimes. They have to be worked in on top of growth spurts, whilst the mind accepts the unusual intelligence as a genuine attribute.” He took another breath to let himself continue.  
  
Quick as a snake, Harry interrupted him. “And now?”  
  
“Now?” Draco blinked and stared at him.   
  
“Do you still think your son is beautiful? Now.” And Harry leaned deliberately back and gestured at Scorpius’s burned and mutilated face.  
  
Draco stared at him. Scorpius looked back, sucking on his lip in a way that he only did when he was worried. But his face, more like Lucius’s than Draco’s, remained smooth and calm.  
  
Despite the burns. Despite the shallow cauldron of crisped and burned and pounded flesh. Despite the missing hair. Despite the flipper-like hand that he leaned confidingly into Harry’s.  
  
Despite all that, Draco could still see the resemblance between Scorpius and the other members of his family.  
  
And the look Scorpius wore now--desperate behind the resolve, trying furiously to act like a Malfoy when he wasn’t certain he could be good enough--was the essence of what Draco had felt during his sixth year and when Harry was hurt.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, and he had not known his own voice was capable of that softness. “Yes, I do.” And he stepped forwards and feathered his fingers down Scorpius’s face, concentrating intently until they came to rest in the twisted and tugged-down corner of his lip. He smiled into Scorpius’s eyes and lifted his fused hand in his own. He had tasted worse things at his parents’ formal dinner parties than the smoothness of that skin under his lips. “He’s lovely.”  
  
Scorpius’s eyes shone like the sun.  
  
*  
  
Harry thought his heart would burst with pride.  
  
It was obvious how much of an effort it took for Draco to touch Scorpius, and Harry suspected that effort would be unequal to touching _him_ , still. But it was Draco and Scorpius’s relationship that was most important, given the strong bonds of blood and love that connected them. Harry could stand it if Draco never loved him again; he might have snapped and gone after Draco with his bare hands if Draco had continued to flinch and look doubtfully at his son.  
  
And Draco’s change was more profound than Harry had thought it would be, he realized when he looked up at the other Malfoys. Lucius was staring at Draco as if he couldn’t comprehend this any more than he could the defeat of the Dark Lord. Narcissa stood with her head tilted back, in almost the same pose Draco had used when confronting his parents. But her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, and she looked straight at Harry, as if the sight of her son touching her grandson was more than she could bear.  
  
 _How sad_ , Harry thought. _They care so much for appearances they can’t even appreciate what’s happened here, what it means for Draco to change his mind like that. I wonder if they would have enchanted Scorpius not to mind their behavior and surrounded him with glamours, if it’s true that the hospital staff can’t do much for his hand and face?_  
  
But that was a suspicion Harry didn’t like to entertain of anybody, so instead he moved back a little so Draco could sit on the hospital bed and stood up to confront Lucius and Narcissa. When he moved towards them, they moved away. Well, good. Harry didn’t think he really wanted them near Scorpius right now.  
  
 _Especially if he’s smart enough to figure out what their expressions mean._  
  
“I think I’ve told you everything the Healers told me,” he said in a quiet, friendly voice. “They’ll do what they can to restore Scorpius, but he won’t ever look completely the way he used to again. Why don’t you go home and think about that? It might do you good.” He stretched out, his right hand planted on the bed, his bad leg half-dangling as his left one supported his weight. He was sure Lucius and Narcissa would realize he was forming a barrier between them, Draco, and Scorpius, but he didn’t think they would realize he was using their own instinctive disgust against them.  
  
Lucius leaned towards him. He probably meant to look menacing, but Harry’s standards for menace had changed after Greyback. “Listen to me, Potter,” he whispered. “You have not the slightest idea of what it means to us to see our grandson damaged like this--”  
  
Harry raised one finger and traced it deliberately along the ridge above his eye. “Oh, yes I do,” he whispered. “And I understand that at the moment, all you’re seeing is that ‘damage.’ You can’t even be glad Scorpius survived, any more than you could be glad he was born healthy. You _had_ to alter him, didn’t you? And right now you’re thinking more about what will make you feel better than what he needs. To me, that’s the perfect example of the selfishness I despised in Voldemort.” He discovered then, to his intense satisfaction and delight, that the name still made Lucius Malfoy flinch. “He wanted to remake the world in his image, and you want to remake your family. I won’t let you. Scorpius is going to live _free_ and _happy_ , two things I value more than you ever could. Go the fuck away now, Lucius, before I show you a few of the tricks that I learned for taking care of Death Eaters.”   
  
He kept his voice perfectly friendly and soft, but his magic flexed around him and rose in a pattern that Harry had seen manifest a few times before it tore loose and killed his torturers. A pair of spangled, shining butterfly wings made of red and silver light unfolded from his shoulders and strained at the edges into sharp projections like teeth. Harry had watched Greyback’s head sheared off his shoulders by one set of those teeth and heard his howl of pain.  
  
Perhaps that memory was visible on his face, because Lucius stiffened once, then turned away with a casual wave of a hand, as if he had meant to all along. He marched to the far end of the room, Narcissa following behind him like the foam on a wave, and turned to deliver his parting shot in a low, vicious voice. “Strange that you’ll fight so strongly for someone who once abandoned you, Mr. Potter.”  
  
“This is about right and wrong,” Harry said, “not about revenge.” He paused thoughtfully, and the wings stretched further from his body, their edges completely spiky now. “Though it could be, if you continue to test me.”  
  
Lucius turned and slipped out of the room, every muscle of his body bristling with dignity.  
  
Narcissa waited. Her eyes caught Harry’s, and she gave him a slow, deep glance that offered pity and scorn both at once. She might as well have spoken aloud.  
  
 _Don’t count on anything from our son. He’s still our son whether he can accept Scorpius or not. That’s not a guarantee that he’ll accept you._  
  
Harry looked serenely back. The Malfoys might think of him as weak because he didn’t watch out for every chance and try to manipulate people like they did, he thought, but his kind of way of being in the world had an advantage that their essential selfishness didn’t. Harry could act in a way he knew to be right for the sake of others who had done a good thing, whether or not that good thing affected him. The Malfoys were bound in helpless blindness until someone touched them directly.  
  
Narcissa’s back was as stiff as Lucius’s by the time she turned away.  
  
Harry waited until he was sure they were gone before facing Draco again. His body and his expression were as calm as they could be, considering that what Narcissa had impressed on him was true.  
  
 _I have no idea if Draco can ever love me again or not. It’s one thing to touch a beloved son and another to take a scarred lover to bed.  
  
But just knowing he has this in him makes me more disposed to give him another chance._  
  
*  
  
Draco watched Harry look at him, and knew exactly what lay beneath the surface.  
  
 _He’s wondering how long this will last. He’s wondering what I can do concerning him. He’s wondering if anything I give to Scorpius can be given to him at all, or if it’s all reserved for my son._  
  
The problem was, Draco himself didn’t know the answer to that question any more than he knew what to do next with his new courage. He had to have plans, but he couldn’t come up with any. The knowledge he needed to make them was knowledge of himself, and that was either absent or changed in the last few minutes.  
  
 _I hate not having a plan._  
  
Maybe, in lieu of anything else, Harry would accept words.  
  
Draco took a deep breath and reached out to clasp Harry’s hand. That was fine; that was safe. Harry’s hands hadn’t been burned, or reshaped, and were still pink and healthy. Draco stared at them as he said softly, “You’ll stay with us so that Scorpius can learn to exist and get around his injuries?”  
  
“I’m going to learn that _anyway_ ,” Scorpius said patiently, and Draco started. He had a bad tendency to forget all about his son when he was listening to a conversation and hadn‘t spoken in a while, which was inexcusable when he wasn’t an ordinary child and was liable to understand more of the words flying around the room. “But Mr. Potter can teach me.” He looked comfortably up at Harry. “Or Harry. Can I call you Harry?”  
  
“Of course,” Harry said, and slid one hand up the burned cheek without flinching at all. Draco, watching, knew he would need to learn to do that.  
  
 _But maybe it doesn’t matter if I can’t be perfect at it the first time. Maybe it’s all right if I take some time to practice it and learn.  
  
And maybe Harry can even teach me that. _  
  
And maybe…and maybe…  
  
Draco slid one hand quickly up Harry’s arm towards his shoulder, and his face. It was as close as he had come of his own free will since Harry was tortured. He froze with his fingers still a few inches away, but Harry looked down at them, then up at Draco, and his eyes were bright with wonder.  
  
“I’d like to call you Harry, too,” he said quietly.  
  
Harry squinted thoughtfully at Draco. Draco had no idea what course he would choose before he smiled and folded his hand over Draco’s.  
  
“You can for a while,” he said lightly. “You don’t have to forever.”  
  
Draco understood the implication behind those words. _This is a good first step, but I can’t rest on my laurels. I’ll have to show him that I’m ready for forgiveness and that I actually want him for a lover._  
  
Draco nodded, never looking away. “Understood.”


	8. With a Full Heart

  
“And you’re really going to do this?” Ron was staring down at the top of Rose’s head, as if he found it hard to meet Harry’s eyes. Rose was shifting restlessly in her dad’s arms; from the way _her_ eyes darted around the hospital corridor, Harry thought she wanted to go exploring.  
  
“Yeah, I am.” Harry leaned against the wall, gratefully using it to take some of the weight off his bad leg. He hadn’t been moving around as much in the last few days as he normally did when metal-dancing, but perhaps the emotional battles had taken their own toll; his leg hurt horribly. “I want to,” he added, when he saw the back of Ron’s neck turning red.  
  
Ron let out several heavy sighs. He probably would have yelled if not for Rose’s presence, Harry thought. Well, this was one thing he could be grateful to Rose for, then. “Well,” he said. “Just know that you’ll always have a home with us, mate, and we’ll be here for you no matter _what_ Malfoy does.”  
  
Harry smiled and clasped Ron’s shoulder. “I know. Tell Hermione I said hello.”  
  
Ron shuddered, as much to say that he didn’t look forwards to explaining to his wife why Harry had chosen to stay with Malfoy and his son, and then turned and set out. Harry watched him for long moments before he turned back to Scorpius’s room.  
  
He was just in time to catch a flash of blond hair out of the corner of his eye, and by the time he stepped back into the room, Draco was sitting next to Scorpius’s bed with a polished innocence that didn’t fool Harry at all.  
  
“I meant what I said,” Harry murmured, after a quick glance to make sure Scorpius was asleep. “I’m not leaving you.”  
  
Draco gave a tiny nod, but didn’t look up. His fingers slid along Scorpius’s fused hand as if it were important for him to learn the texture of the skin by heart.  
  
Harry swallowed his pleasure at seeing Draco touch one of his son’s wounds so unselfconsciously, and knelt down next to the chair. “This won’t work if you don’t trust me,” he said.  
  
“Do you know how many times you’ve walked away?” Draco’s voice was as bitter as a bad onion. “Left me alone? I may have been the one to say things you couldn’t stand, but you were the one who walked away.”  
  
Harry controlled the impulse to snap. This had been a trait of Draco’s when they were dating, too: he would have a moment of triumph when he believed in Harry completely, such as the morning he had made Rita Skeeter flee with a few well-timed insults, and then he would collapse in on himself and start violently doubting that anything could work. It exasperated Harry, but no doubt it was connected to other traits about Draco that he loved, traits without which Draco would not have been who he was.  
  
So he shifted his weight, kept in the hiss he wanted to make as his bad leg twinged again, and said, “I’m not going to do that this time.”  
  
“How do you know?” Draco finally lifted his head, his eyes haunted and full of anger because they were haunted. Draco had the strangest conviction that showing his own pain would make Harry laugh at him, although Harry had treated him as gently as he could at every opportunity. “Maybe I’ll slip up again and you’ll walk away again. You can’t _know_.”  
  
Harry bit his tongue to keep from saying that he thought Draco’s calling him a monster had been an expression of what he really felt, rather than a slip. “But things are different now,” he said, and cocked his head at Scorpius.  
  
Draco hunched his shoulders like a scorpion getting ready to sting. “So you’re only staying for him, and not for me?”  
  
Harry shook his head. He wasn’t about to get distracted into one of the arguments Draco handled so well because he was expert at spinning distortions from simple words. “I don’t know that things will be different,” he said. “What should matter is that I’m willing to take the chance and try again.”  
  
“If you can’t give me a guarantee of certainty—“  
  
“No, I can’t,” Harry said sharply, and stood up abruptly enough that he would have wrung a cry of pain from his own mouth in a different mood. Right now, he needed some distance from Draco. “Just like I can’t guarantee that Scorpius or I will ever find a cure for our scars. Just like I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever care to have me in your bed again.”  
  
“Harry—“  
  
“ _No_. If I make sacrifices, you have to too, Draco. Our love broke apart once, so I’m not comfortable saying it’ll be permanent this time. That’s what you have to understand.”  
  
Draco stared up at him, breathing fast. Harry looked back at him, both love and exasperation wringing every fiber of his being.  
  
“I’m going to fetch one of the Healers who worked on Scorpius,” he said. “Maybe he can tell us something new about his hand or his face.” And out he limped.  
  
*  
  
The next few days were ones of learning for Draco.  
  
He learned how to be patient when one of the Healers tending Scorpius’s face sat back on her heels and simply cried over the pocket of pounded flesh in his cheekbone, which was the most resistant to Healing spells. Scorpius looked up at her in wonder and then stuck his thumb in his mouth, a childish habit Draco had thought him broken of six months ago. This place wasn’t good for his son, he thought, but on the other hand, there was no one whose knowledge he would trust if they went back to Morningswood.  
  
Malfoy Manor was out of the question, for now, with his parents still burning to use Dark spells on Scorpius whether or not it was safe.  
  
He learned how to watch Scorpius use his maimed hand as a scoop and a pincer, the way a seal might use its flipper, and not be disgusted. If he concentrated on the motions Scorpius made instead of the look of the thing he made it with, he could even be proud that a Malfoy was clever enough to get around an injury that would have defeated the ingenuity of many lesser wizards.  
  
He learned to watch Harry, and bear it.  
  
Harry hung over Scorpius’s bed, watching him eat and talk, and nodded constantly. He whispered advice in his ear when Scorpius had to begin coming off the potions he’d taken and whimpered with pain. He cramped his bad leg with the length of time he sat in one place, holding Scorpius’s hand, because that was the only way Scorpius consented to fall asleep.  
  
He spoke to Draco with affection, with gentleness, with concern. He talked about the dark circles under Draco’s eyes, Scorpius’s progress, and the wonders that Healing spells could do now, which they hadn’t been able to perform when he was in hospital three years ago. He was encouraging and kind to the point that Draco wanted sometimes to vomit—  
  
And sometimes to cling to him and never let him go.  
  
He tried to come up with more plans for dealing with Harry over the days as they stretched into weeks, as the Healers strengthened Scorpius’s neck back to normal levels and managed to heal the burned left side of his face. But his attention was too much absorbed by his son, who, the Healers told him solemnly, would always have a fused hand and bear the marks of mutilation on the right side of his face.   
  
_Two years old_ , Draco thought, one night two weeks later, sitting at Scorpius’s side and staring numbly down at him. _He’s two years old._  
  
The thought of a world where someone that young could suffer like this made him want to weep with fury.  
  
And then determination surged in him. Perhaps the British Healers thought that about Scorpius, but Draco had the money and the time to visit other countries and get other Healers’ opinions. He would find a cure for Scorpius if he spent the rest of his life doing it. Scorpius did not deserve to remain disfigured just because the dwarves were careless and—and because Draco had agreed to the spells that made him smart enough to evade protection.  
  
 _And Harry?_  
  
Draco hesitated. Harry had promised to stay with them no matter what, but what if he didn’t want to go to Italy or Germany or Russia, or wherever else Draco’s journey to find a Healer took him? Draco dreaded his own reaction if Harry refused and stayed in Britain. And he had friends here, a job, a life. He’d already neglected a lot of that by staying with Draco and Scorpius as long as he had. Would he come with them for years? Could Draco ask Harry to give up his life for this quest?  
  
 _When I’m going to be looking for a cure for him as well…_  
  
Draco sat up. He might have a hard time doing it, but yes, he would ask Harry for his companionship. At the least, it would settle the question quickly of whether Harry would walk away from them or stay. Harry would not have expected to be confronted with a choice that soon, and so he would respond without thinking—which meant Draco would get his _real_ answer.  
  
He was congratulating himself on coming up with such a clever plan when the door to Scorpius’s room opened, and Harry staggered in, looking triumphant.  
  
“I think I can heal Scorpius partially,” he said.  
  
*  
  
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” Harry explained, ducking his head under the lintel of the shed as he passed into it. “After all, who are the ones who would know the most about dwarf magic? The dwarves themselves, of course.”  
  
He _felt_ Draco give a shiver behind him, which he didn’t turn to see, and he heard the rustle of cloth as Scorpius squirmed in his father’s arms, trying to see better. Harry had expected that. Not even the Healers’ cautions—they’d been reluctant to release Scorpius from their care for any reason—and the trauma he had suffered in a place like this could dim the curiosity and intelligence that burned in the little boy.  
  
 _Curiosity and intelligence that Draco almost certainly put there with his spells._  
  
Harry shook his head. He’d never known Scorpius any other way, and he was not going to start thinking of him as warped or unnatural because of what his parents and grandparents had done.  
  
“Can we trust them?” Draco’s voice was low, as if he imagined that his words would really go unnoticed in the clang of hammers around them. Harry could have told him how good dwarves’ ears were, but he decided not to bother; Grishnazk was already turning towards them and would make it clear in a moment. “They might be jealous of Scorpius—“  
  
“You have a strange concept of jealousy, even for a human.”  
  
Draco stiffened and clutched Scorpius tighter. Scorpius kicked to be let down, gazing at Grishnazk in fascination. The dwarf eyed them both with a mixture of amusement and contempt, then turned and looked at Harry.  
  
“I don’t promise a complete cure,” he said. “There’s no way we can promise that.”  
  
Harry nodded. Keeping his word was important to a dwarf. And Grishnazk was being pragmatic as well, in doing what he could to avoid the enraged disappointment of someone with Draco’s money and power. “We understand that,” he said. “We want hope. Not miracles.” He looked hard at Draco, to make sure Draco understood, too.  
  
Draco’s hands turned white where they clutched around Scorpius’s waist. Then he nodded, looking as if each separate muscle in his neck needed to be coaxed into the motion, and knelt to put Scorpius on the ground.  
  
Grishnazk reached out and put a hand on the boy’s head, tilting his face to the side. He stood a little taller than Scorpius, but his eyes weren’t brighter. Scorpius examined him with an intensity that made Harry suffer a single hopeless moment of pity for his future Hogwarts professors.  
  
“Magic hurt you,” said Grishnazk. “Our magic. Do you trust it to help you?”  
  
“Yes,” said Scorpius at once. “Magic isn’t evil. Even Dark Arts aren’t really evil,” he added, looking up at Harry and speaking with Lucius’s inflections for a moment. “It’s just about power and how you use it.”  
  
Harry checked a sigh. _Yes, his Hogwarts professors will have to create entire new classes just to handle him._  
  
Grishnazk nodded and reached over his shoulder. Another dwarf had stepped forwards with a hammer; Harry hadn’t even seen him move. Any comparisons between him and the dwarves were off, really, he thought. They might both have twisted bodies by normal standards, but the dwarves were perfectly at home in theirs and moved with silent grace, whilst Harry had to struggle even when he stood for a few hours.  
  
Grishnazk used the hammer to tap Scorpius on the left shoulder, lightly enough that although the boy staggered, no pain shone on his face. Draco, though, snarled under his breath and started forwards.  
  
“Keep him from interfering,” Grishnazk told Harry, never taking his eyes from the ruined part of Scorpius’s right face. “Once the current of magic has been established in the boy’s body, it cannot be interrupted, or he is likely to end up worse than before.”  
  
Harry nodded and grabbed Draco around the waist and shoulders. Draco struggled madly, making small grunts and whinges and whimpers beneath his breath. Harry tightened his hold, at once moved by how much he loved his son and irritated by the force of Draco’s prejudice.  
  
“He’s only helping him,” Harry whispered back. “You let the Healers cast all kinds of spells on Scorpius that you didn’t understand, either. _Wait_ and see what happens before you spring to conclusions.”  
  
Draco stepped on his feet in reply. Harry grimaced; he was no longer capable of wrestling Draco to the ground as he once would have. But he thrust his face close, and Draco stiffened and blinked, the sight of Harry’s scars distracting his attention again.  
  
Meanwhile, Grishnazk had tapped Scorpius under the ribs on his right side, in a rough diagonal from his left shoulder. Scorpius laughed and said, “That tickles. What are you doing?”  
  
“Establishing a connection between one side of the body and another,” Grishnazk said, voice deep, and this time touched the head of the hammer to Scorpius’s face and then to his hand.   
  
The magic was building now; Harry could feel it, that elusive power he sometimes experienced when he watched a forging and almost, _almost_ grasped the sheer comprehension of the metal and the fire that drove it. Purple sparks whirled around Scorpius, quickly adopting the colors of fire and rising towards gold, then orange, then red, then blue and white. Grishnazk muttered a single harsh phrase that sounded like rocks rolling against each other and drew the hammer in a straight line from Scorpius’s mouth down his body.  
  
Windy streaks of fire coiled around Scorpius like sunset clouds, hiding and cradling him in the midst of strands of pink and peach. Draco started and began to pull against Harry’s hold again; he seemed to have realized that he couldn’t see his son anymore. Harry pressed one hand against his chest and murmured into his ear, “I wouldn’t have trusted Grishnazk with Scorpius if I didn’t already trust him with my own life.”  
  
Again came Draco’s startled pause. And then, clear across the air between them and the hidden dwarf and boy, came Grishnazk’s voice. “What fire has done, fire cannot always undo,” he said. “Instead this will be a new forging. I am the most skilled smith here, and yet this is fine and delicate work. I will only trust myself with part of it, so that I do not reshape parts of you that must stay the same. Which do you wish healed, your face or your hand?”  
  
Draco drew in air. Harry clutched him again, forcing it out. He thought this had to be Scorpius’s choice and Scorpius’s choice alone.  
  
All the same, his own heart was beating very hard at the thought of a little boy’s flesh being resculpted and manipulated the way that his own had been.  
  
“My hand,” said Scorpius. “It gets in the way more than my face.” A thoughtful pause. “My father would like me to change my face, but it’s _my_ face. And he and Harry will love me no matter what, and I’ll have lots of sweets after this because they’ll be worried, so it’s my hand.”  
  
“The hand it shall be,” Grishnazk said, and although Harry couldn’t see them, he was certain the dwarf had bowed to Scorpius.  
  
A ringing tone broke out from within the clouds, stirring them. They began to rotate, to the point where Harry’s eyes watered from trying to look at them.   
  
So he looked at Draco instead.  
  
His expression was so mixed, love and yearning and anger and despair, that Harry felt himself tremble as if he would collapse. How could his memory have painted Draco as emotionless or petty? Someone who could feel like this, and all at once, was far from the many apathetic people Harry had met during his life; even those who pretended to enthusiasm for metal-dancing tended to come across as faint and pale compared to Harry’s own commitment to it.  
  
He wanted that passion for himself, again. And it wasn’t worth any sacrifice to have it, but it would be worth some struggle.  
  
He laid his head on Draco’s shoulder and stroked his stomach comfortingly. The fire glowed and writhed and danced, and Grishnazk’s hammer made a sound as if it were striking metal, and Scorpius cried out in awe.  
  
Draco sobbed, once, and his hands clenched into his chest as if he would tear himself apart.  
  
And then the mist cleared, and revealed Scorpius standing with the handle of Grishnazk’s hammer in his hands. Magical intelligence or not, his family hadn’t increased his bodily strength, and so he couldn’t hold it aloft. But he turned to Draco and beamed with delight, fanning his fingers out carefully so that his father could make out his healed hand. Even his face, Harry thought, looked a bit better, the flesh on the cheekbone stretched and shiny and a uniform grey instead of the dripping, roasted fat it had resembled before.  
  
“Look, Daddy!” Scorpius said proudly. “I’m _holding_ it!”  
  
Like his father, Harry discovered in that moment, Draco wept without tears.  
  
*  
  
Draco couldn’t stop holding Scorpius and smoothing his hair and kissing him. The moment he had vanished into the fire, Draco had been sure Harry was wrong, his instincts were right, and the dwarves wanted to harm his son. The ringing tone had made him think they were hammering Scorpius to pieces.  
  
But Scorpius was alive and unharmed—and Draco would never touch the shiny skin of his fused fingers again.  
  
He looked up finally, over his son’s head, and into the measuring eyes of the dwarf who had done this for them. The dwarf looked a lot like a Malfoy at that moment, Draco thought reluctantly, his face cool, reflecting only the satisfaction of a job well done.  
  
“Thank you,” he said, the words harsh and foreign in his mouth.  
  
The dwarf nodded. “Work on the sigils should be done in a week,” he said, and turned away. He did pause long enough to look at Harry. “You’re returning to work?”  
  
“Yes, I think so.” Harry gave Draco a small smile with so much emotion hiding in it that Draco started. “After all, we did find a partial cure for Scorpius, and dancing out the protective patterns for Morningswood was what Draco originally hired me for.”  
  
“Idiot,” Draco said.  
  
Harry blinked and retreated a defensive step. His leg spasmed as he did so, almost enough to throw him off-balance. Draco hated to see the way he resigned himself to a graceless stumble instead of reaching out for help. “Well, that _was_ what you hired me for, and I could hardly practice the craft whilst we were in hospital, so—“  
  
“No,” Draco said. “Why did you think I wanted you to leave? Why did you think this was enough?”  
  
“You can, of course, look out for a further cure,” Harry said with great care. “But I spoke with Grishnazk before I fetched you, and you heard what he said himself. He doesn’t think it likely that he can cure more of Scorpius’s injuries, and Healers who work with dwarf magic would be rare.”  
  
“There’s _you_ ,” said Draco. “I was talking about _you_. Why would you leave before we started looking for a cure for _your_ injuries?”  
  
“I’ve been asking around, actually, the last few weeks,” Harry said, his voice tight. “I’ve been told that this spell is one no Healer in St. Mungo’s has ever seen before. Because it was me—“ God, what inexpressible bitterness in his voice “—they wrote abroad. No one else they contacted can identify it, either. The secret of healing me died with Greyback.”  
  
“But we’ll look,” said Draco. “And dear Merlin, Harry—“ He flushed for a moment as he realized he was making this confession in front of a bored dwarf and his far-too-interested son, but he went on, because he needed to speak the words no matter how little Harry needed to hear them. “Don’t you know I want you to stay because you’re you?”  
  
The look Harry turned towards him then was so raw that Draco stood up, put one hand on Scorpius’s shoulder, and reached out with the other. The dwarf had turned to his work, he noted dimly. Well, good. At least he had less of an audience for this.  
  
Harry caught himself and closed his face in the next moment. His voice was low and so harsh that Draco almost thought he was angry. “There’s a limit to how much I need to do for other people, Draco. I did what I could to cheer you up and heal Scorpius. I did more than those Healers could. I prevented your parents from scarring him further. I managed your affairs for you during the past fortnight. What do you _want_ of me other than that? What can you give me? I know there’s no chance you’ll ever be my lover again—“  
  
“You don’t know that,” Draco said.  
  
Hope cracked like lightning across Harry’s face. “Then—“  
  
“I don’t know it, either,” Draco said stubbornly. God, his embarrassment wanted to drown him, and so did memories. Once he had reached his hand towards Harry like this, and it had been rejected. He didn’t know what he would do if that happened again. “Just like you didn’t know whether you would stay with me or walk away again. The future isn’t certain. I have to learn to live with things that aren’t certain. Well, so do you, bloody Harry Potter.”  
  
“So.” Harry shifted his weight and grimaced with pain as his bad leg no doubt responded. Draco had to stop himself from drawing his wand, because he knew it would look to Harry like he was taking his hand away, but honestly, _something_ could be done with pain spells to relieve his suffering. He just needed to look. “You’re—willing to try?”  
  
“Yes.” Draco still flinched when he looked at Harry’s face; he didn’t think he could touch it yet, but he didn’t feel he had to turn away, either. “I am.”  
  
Harry stepped forwards and clasped his hand.  
  
Draco closed his eyes; the clinging emotions fell away, and he had one moment of perfect peace.  
  
“I knew you would stay,” said Scorpius, his voice so ineffably smug that Draco felt a sudden moment of pity for his Hogwarts teachers. “Because Daddy and I are special like that.”


	9. The Eye of the Beholder

  
Harry shook the rain out of his hair as he stepped through Ron and Hermione’s front door. An unexpected thunderstorm had rolled up as he left Morningswood, and Harry had Apparated into a heavier downpour still. He called out his friends’ names as he shut the door, curious why Rose hadn’t already run forwards to welcome him.  
  
Hermione stepped out a small room off the entrance hall. Her face was so grave that Harry started when he saw her. “Are you all right?” he asked, taking an incautious step forwards and grimacing when a wave of pain ran up his right leg. “Has Rose got sick? Where’s Ron?”  
  
Hermione’s face softened. “Everyone’s all right, Harry,” she murmured, and held out a hand so he could take it. “Ron’s taken Rose to the Burrow to visit her grandmother, that’s all. But I wanted to talk to you about Malfoy.”  
  
 _Here it comes_. Harry doubted his best friends would understand his resolution at first; he had a hard time understanding it himself, sometimes, or at least putting it into the right words. It didn’t fit the philosophy he’d built into his mind over the past three years. Was he giving in too much to Draco? Was he demanding too much? Did this actually let him have the full life and the appreciative friends he had decided to embrace after Draco left him?  
  
All he knew was that he _wanted_ Draco. Justifying the desire was harder.  
  
He clasped Hermione’s hand and said, “I want you to know that I’ve decided to start dating Draco again.”  
  
Hermione didn’t change her expression. “That’s your choice, Harry,” she said. “And even Ron will support you, although he probably won’t understand it. But it’s going to be a lot harder to keep us from taking revenge this time if Malfoy disappoints you.” And for a moment her eyes acquired a hard edge and a sharp gleam that made Harry think, startled, of the planes of metal that the dwarves took off the fires and consigned to him for metal-dancing.  
  
“But that’s part of the point,” Harry said. “We don’t know if it’ll work yet. We aren’t talking about permanent commitments the way we were when we first started dating.” Of course, part of the reason they’d talked about permanency _then_ was to convince skeptical reporters and Draco’s parents that this wasn’t a lustful fling they could easily disrupt. Harry wondered for a moment how the older Malfoys would react this time, then put it out of his mind. Hermione was the one he had to convince. “We’re—just going to go on into the future. I want to be Draco’s friend, and stay with him, for as long as I can stand to be only friends. And Draco wants to be my lover again, but he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to get past the way I look yet. If, at some point, one of us decides we’ve had enough or wants something better, we can walk away. And that might happen. I can’t ask Draco to just change everything about himself, and I wouldn’t want him to. And he can’t ask me to be a patient martyr waiting for the day when he’ll consent to sleep with me, and he doesn’t want me to.”  
  
He stopped. Hermione’s face had grown pale with concern.  
  
“That doesn’t sound healthy, Harry,” she whispered. “A marriage is a greater commitment than that. It doesn’t break apart when someone gets bored or decides they can’t stand it anymore.”  
  
Harry blinked. “Yes, it does,” he said. “I know a lot of people who got divorced because they couldn’t stand it anymore. Dean, when he decided that he didn’t like his wife pushing him towards a ‘real’ career instead of accepting that he was an artist. Lavender, when she discovered that her husband wanted her to have babies all the time instead of waiting a few years between each one. Daphne Greengrass, because—“  
  
Hermione made an exasperated noise. “But that’s not the ideal,” she said. “A marriage isn’t _supposed_ to be breakable. Yes, people get divorced over things like that, but it’s not meant to happen.”  
  
Harry looked at her thoughtfully. “I think my ideals and Draco’s have cost us a lot,” he said slowly. “I refused to compromise and cover my face with a glamour at all, and I gave up on finding cures for my scars and my leg before that was necessary. And Draco refused to see anything less than perfect beauty as worthwhile. We still want to hold on to those ideals, but the edges of them were too sharp, and we think we can soften them.” He touched one of the ridges on his face absent-mindedly, thinking of the spell without which it would rip his flesh to shreds. “Just like people have to change their definition of marriage when they find out it’s not the ideal. The real thing should be more important.”  
  
Hermione blinked at him like a lizard, and then said, “That’s very thoughtful, Harry. I’m impressed.”  
  
Harry grinned a little, and heard his skin crackle as he did. It seemed to be in one of the moods where it stretched and flexed as if newly shaped. He ignored that for the moment. Yes, it was another thing Draco would have to get used to if they stayed together, but they had the time now. “I don’t know if it’s thoughtful,” he said. “I don’t know if it will work out. I don’t really know anything, except that both Draco and I are going to move through life together as long as we can.”  
  
Hermione sighed. “Yes, that _is_ the rub,” she said. “I don’t want to see you unhappy because you can’t have something permanent. I always thought you were the kind of person who would want a long-lasting marriage and a family—“  
  
“I have that now,” Harry said pointedly, “with Draco and Scorpius.”  
  
“He’s still not your blood child, Harry. And Draco might take him away if things don’t work out.” Hermione looked miserable, but there was a tightness to her mouth that Harry knew would lead her to press forwards mercilessly, in the name of causing him pain now so that he wouldn’t suffer it later.  
  
“I know that,” Harry said. “I accept the risk.”  
  
“It’s mad,” Hermione said, “what you’re willing to do.”  
  
“For love?” Harry smiled, thinking of his walk through the Forbidden Forest to face Voldemort, and how he had risked his body and heart with Ginny in order to learn how to laugh and make love again—he had not been completely able to trust her at the time, stinging as he was from Draco’s rejection—and how he had felt the moment he met Draco face-to-face in the Metal-dancers’ shed. “I don’t think so.”  
  
“I don’t feel the same,” Hermione said, “but it’s your life and your responsibility what to do with it. We’ll be here when you need us.” She reached out and clasped Harry’s cheeks, bringing his forehead to her lips to kiss it without hesitation. Other than Ginny, Hermione was the one who had done the least amount of flinching from Harry’s scars. She could see the beauty in house-elves, though, so Harry didn’t find that surprising. “I’ll tell Ron, and I’m sure he’ll take it better coming from me, once he sees I’m convinced.”  
  
“Partially convinced?” Harry teased, hearing the way her voice wavered on the last word.  
  
“Yes, that.” Hermione smiled at him.  
  
Harry slipped out the door and Apparated to Ginny’s flat, feeling happier than he had in a long time.  
  
*  
  
“So I can’t set boggarts on him?”  
  
Harry laughed and wrapped an arm around Ginny’s shoulder, swinging her in a circle. She went along with him, laughing, her head tilted back and her arms coming up to embrace him.   
  
“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said, when they stopped swinging. “You deserve to be. And Malfoy will make some mistake in the future, I’m certain, so the chance to set boggarts on him isn’t altogether lost.”  
  
“Send them into Morningswood,” Harry said dryly, “and they’d probably meet Scorpius and kill themselves from sheer fear.”  
  
“I reckoned a Malfoy would have a child like that,” Ginny said, rolling her eyes. Harry didn’t correct her; he thought that the secret of the intelligence-enhancing spells the Malfoys had cast on Scorpius shouldn’t be his to give away. “But I just hope this works out for you, Harry.” She smiled up at him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her one eye shone so brilliantly that Harry thought it would have to be a poor man indeed who could object to the loss of the other. “And if he tries to touch someone else whilst he’s dating you, I’ll cut his fingers off.”  
  
Harry knew better than to scold her. He kissed her one more time and left to go back to Morningswood.  
  
His step was bouncing and his leg felt better and the sky looked bluer than it should. He knew all of that was the pure artificial effect of joy that might or might not last.  
  
He didn’t care.  
  
*  
  
Draco frowned at the owl that had bowled towards him and landed aggressively on his windowsill, leaping and hooting in place until he took the letter. He didn’t recognize the bird, and he didn’t think he had any acquaintances that would buy one so rude. But who else would have reason to write to him? If the Malfoys had not become social outcasts since the war, they also had no new popularity.  
  
The paper itself was of low quality, and the handwriting that had scrawled his name a scribbled dash, and Draco’s eyebrows rose higher still as he read the message inside.  
  
 _Malfoy,  
  
I’m Harry’s friend. I used to be his lover. I helped him get back some sense of his own self-worth after he left your worthless arse. And now I work with Dark creatures.   
  
If you hurt him again, look forwards to a house infested with pogrebins, boggarts, banshees, and the occasional Dementor.   
  
Not at all insincerely,   
Ginny Weasley._  
  
*  
  
They were still cautious with each other, Harry realized one morning a month later, and he wondered if they always would be.  
  
He looked thoughtfully at Draco across the breakfast table. Draco was currently coaxing Scorpius to swallow a banana, on the pretext that he would get sweets afterwards. Scorpius was peering intently into his father’s eyes to determine if this was a lie.  
  
Morning after morning, he had watched scenes like this, and he had smiled and tried to offer Scorpius healthier food himself. Scorpius seemed more inclined to accept it from him, though why that should be, Harry didn’t know. And Draco would smile at him, and Harry would feel as though he had won a victory and choose his words more carefully.  
  
They had begun to bid each other good night with touches on the arms and shoulders as well as handshakes. Harry had refused to touch Draco that intimately, though, until Draco had stepped closer to him with a noise of frustration one evening and brushed a finger swiftly across the knuckles of his right hand.  
  
“You can touch me, too,” he said, but he moved away before Harry could do more than give a quick clasp on his shoulder.  
  
Harry felt himself hovering in limbo, between one choice and another, always concerned that he might make the wrong one. If he embraced Draco the way he wanted to, Draco might stiffen, or patiently endure it only so that he wouldn’t hurt Harry’s feelings. Harry wanted an honest reaction, but also an affectionate one.  
  
“Scorpius, please,” Draco said, voice worn threadbare with exasperation.  
  
Scorpius eyed the strings hanging off the banana’s sides resignedly, and then tore loose a small slice and swallowed it at a gulp.   
  
_He has confidence that Draco loves him no matter what_ , Harry thought, clenching his hands around the sides of his teacup to hide his feelings. _He heard Draco say so in hospital, when he declared him beautiful. But what guarantee do I have?_  
  
Then he shook his head at himself and smiled wryly. No guarantees was exactly what he had agreed to when he decided to live with Draco as a friend for the present, and anyway, what good would a promise have been unless it was made of Draco’s own free will?  
  
 _Maybe I want the impossible. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting._  
  
Draco looked up, as if aware that Harry was watching him. He couldn’t have sensed the emotion behind the regard, though, because he gave Harry a sly smile and rolled his eyes at Scorpius, as much to say that, between the two of them, they _might_ be able to handle one active two-year-old.   
  
_And yes_ , Harry thought, as he smiled back and felt his tension, for the moment, glow and melt like strands of sunlight caught in a spiderweb. _I want him, and for now, I’m willing to wait._   
  
He saluted Draco with his teacup.  
  
“What are you planning?” demanded Scorpius, glaring from one of them to the other.  
  
*  
  
Draco reached out, then hesitated. Despite the reassurances he had received from Harry, he still didn’t know if he could touch the protective sigils that hung around Morningswood without receiving either an electric shock or a line of blood razed along his finger.  
  
 _They only affect Muggles, Harry says.  
  
Ha, yes_ , snapped a different part of his memory. _That was why one of them managed to throw you five feet when you so much as looked at it._  
  
Draco shook his head. He was getting distracted. He had come out to look at these sigils, because, if he found it hard to look at Harry still, he thought he might be able to see the beauty in the things Harry had created.  
  
And the more days passed—it had been almost six weeks since the dwarves had managed to heal Scorpius’s hand now—the more Draco craved that beauty, longed to touch Harry freely, and became irritated with the stupid prejudices and hesitations that held him back.  
  
This was a good start, he decided stubbornly, and began to pace along the wall that encircled Morningswood, now made of bent branches and glistening webs of light behind the sigils. Draco had wanted a look that would combine nature and magic, both of which wizards were closer to than Muggles were.  
  
Silver, copper, platinum, nickel. Each one, Draco thought, had a basic pattern of loops centered around a thin spine, but he could only see that by squinting until his eyes watered—and even then, he wasn’t sure that he was right. It seemed more likely that the loops were fooling him, dissolving into one another and multiplying themselves until he was lost.  
  
He knew, because he had watched Harry bring one to life, that none of these patterns were conscious. Instead, they were what came out of the fusion of fire and hammer and dwarf magic, first, and then Harry’s song and magic and intuition. Somehow, he learned as he made them what shape they should be.  
  
It was a concept alien to Draco, who had spent part of the last month waking up in a cold sweat because he couldn’t yet pinpoint a day when he would be ready to make love with Harry. But the more he thought about the way Harry worked, the more it appealed to him.  
  
There was a kind of wild beauty in it, the notion of springing up to meet a challenge and flying in partnership with one’s magic, dancing with it, letting it guide one’s movements even as one guided it in return. Draco knew his own magic as something he needed to control, strictly, unless he wanted countless accidental and embarrassing bursts of power following him about. He recoiled in distaste from the mere memory of the things he had sometimes done before he acquired his wand. His parents had been disappointed in him for Apparating himself from his bed into theirs during a thunderstorm. It was a double loss of control, over his magic and over his fear.  
  
But Harry walked, fearless, up to a dragon that might destroy him, and instead trusted the dragon to carry him. And the dragon, not tame but willing to be persuaded, lowered its head and let him ride it.   
  
Draco would not want that kind of life for himself, but he could see admiring it and longing to be close to it.  
  
He hesitated, then managed to reach out and touch one of the copper sigils. Warmth struck up his arm, but settled down to a steady glow between his shoulder and his wrist. Draco shivered. It was like standing with his hand in a flame that he knew would not burn him. He gazed, absorbed, and watched the webs of light that hung around the sigil skip and spark from its surface.   
  
He had always thought copper a dull metal. Now he saw it could awaken with the hues of fire.  
  
 _The way that Harry’s eyes still awaken with beauty despite the ravages of the face that surrounds them._  
  
The pattern drew in his eye, absorbed his attention. Draco could see, now, that he had been wrong about the thin spine in this particular sigil. Instead, it had a figure eight, an infinity symbol, as the base, and from that hung other infinity symbols, and delicate, airy bells, and shapes like blossoming, triumphant flowers. Draco’s mind raced outwards, around in spirals and down in lines, to encompass them all, and he bit his tongue and felt blood drip down his chin from trying to see, from trying to _understand_ -  
  
The whole shimmered before him for a single, simple, inexpressible moment, and his mind was attached to all the four corners of creation like a spiderweb itself, and he understood them all.  
  
And then it collapsed, falling apart like a pool of water or a pile of ice crystals, and Draco made a soft keening noise.  
  
He turned away, setting his back to the fence and trying to forget about what he had seen. But he couldn’t. No, he didn’t remember the details anymore, but the organic vision had burned itself into his mind, and he couldn’t let it go. He found himself tracing it over and over again, his hands making helpless motions in front of him. If he could connect _this_ corner to _this_ corner, if he could tangle two of the lines that ran through the center, then maybe—  
  
And then he saw Harry himself, walking towards Morningswood. He seemed to like Apparating in from a distance and then taking a slow pace. Or maybe he had to take a slow pace because of that wounded leg, Draco thought absently.  
  
He gazed steadily at Harry’s figure for long moments. Harry moved with his head bowed, his black hair blowing in a tangled mess around it, his strong leg leading and his bad leg dragging. Draco knew he had gone to view a new commission this morning, a large estate that might need as many as a hundred protective sigils. He had probably dealt with people who wanted to gape at him, thanks to his fame and his face, and he had had to maintain a cheerful and pleasant demeanor in front of them.   
  
But he wouldn’t show his weakness. Not then. He only showed it on the way home, with his old injuries aching and, as he thought, alone.  
  
 _And he makes beauty like this._  
  
Draco swallowed something that felt like desire, and then turned and slipped away into the house. He wasn’t yet ready to see Harry see Draco watching him.  
  
*  
  
Harry had almost managed to forget about his leg; he’d sat so long in the library, absorbed in one of the wizarding novels he’d never had enough time to read in Hogwarts. The words darted across the page, changing the kind of story it was as the reader’s mind changed, but keeping the same characters and some of the same phrasing. At the moment, Harry was deeply interested in the story of a young Muggleborn woman who had ridden into a tangled wood to confront Grindelwald’s half-brother and the Queen of the Veelas. It seemed natural to shift his position so that he could stay longer in the same chair and keep reading in more comfort.  
  
But he had left his leg unattended too long, and pain tore up his scars and to his hip as though someone were opening the wound again. Harry bent over, breathless with agony, his vision graying out. His heartbeat sounded like it belonged to someone else, so frantic and thready was it. Harry took one breath, then another, and felt as though someone had jammed knives into his thigh and foot.  
  
He had a discipline for moments like this, but it took him some moments of scrambling before he found it. _Breathe in. Breathe out. You can do this. It’s only a wound, and you’ve walked on it and limped on it and danced on it for the last three years. Are you going to let a moment of pain undo everything you’ve worked for?_  
  
“For God’s _sake_ ,” said someone from a distance, and Harry felt panic strike him almost as sharply as the pain, because he had never wanted Scorpius to see him like this. The boy had known enough suffering; Harry wanted to show him strength. But then a wand tapped his shoulder, and Harry knew it was Draco instead. No matter how smart Scorpius was, he didn’t have perfect control of his magic at two years old.  
  
Then he realized he could think about other things, and that some of his pain had ceased. His leg still twitched warningly, and he knew he wouldn’t want to stand anytime soon, but he could breathe. He leaned back in the chair and blinked at Draco, who was staring at him with a look of pure disgust Harry hadn’t seen in a while.  
  
“What spell was that?” Harry asked. “I have to learn it.”  
  
“That,” Draco said, voice flat, “was a simple relaxation and warming charm that the Healers teach any patient who’s ever injured. I know that, because I had to go to St. Mungo’s for some wounds of my own. You _must_ know it, Harry. They would have given this to you, along with more powerful charms, when you were in there for treatment.” He paused for a moment. “In fact, I think I was there the day the mediwitch taught it to you. Why haven’t you been using it?”  
  
Harry cleared his throat and lowered his eyes to the book, which was now more fascinating than ever.  
  
“Harry?” Draco leaned towards him, his voice grown dangerous. “I thought it was odd that you were in so much pain, but I didn’t think that you were _resisting_ using the charms. Why were you?”  
  
“I just—I should be able to live with the pain,” Harry muttered, still staring at the book. He welcomed Draco’s company ninety percent of the time, but now he could only wonder why in the world Draco had come into the library. This was the time of the evening he usually settled Scorpius into bed, and Scorpius had been imperious about requesting only his father’s help today. “No charm cures everything, and I didn’t want to become dependent on them. And that charm really _didn’t_ help much when they first taught it to me.”  
  
“But it helped somewhat,” Draco said, and then stopped speaking. Harry looked up to see him shaking his head again and again, as if tormented by buzzing flies. “Dear Merlin,” he muttered at last. “Your stupidity has rendered me speechless.”  
  
“I don’t want anyone to think I’m weak,” Harry began angrily.  
  
Draco collapsed into the chair across from him and burst into helpless laughter.  
  
Harry bristled. When Draco’s laughter didn’t stop, he hauled himself to his feet, keeping a tight hold on the back of the chair.  
  
Bad mistake. The pain raced up his leg and exploded like a firework in his chest again. Harry groaned, but Draco growled the charm a second time, and the spasming muscles fell limp and compliant.  
  
“No one could ever think you were weak,” said Draco, with a heaviness in the back of his voice that made Harry think he was about to spit flame. “You _know_ that, Harry. How in the world could you think otherwise? I never thought you were _weak_. Stupid, yes. Ugly, yes. Determined to hold onto your principles to the point of sacrificing the love we shared, oh bloody fuck yes. But not this. You’re telling me that one reason you’ve limped around the past two months has been your _pride_ , and nothing else?”  
  
“I saw some other patients become addicted to the pain-blocking charms when I was researching a cure with Hermione two years ago,” Harry retorted, face turned away. He could at least give thanks for the color of his skin and the malformation of it now; it rarely revealed when he was blushing anymore. “I didn’t want that to happen to me.”  
  
“Then use them in private, and sparingly, and _get other people to help you look up alternatives_ ,” Draco said. He jumped up from the chair and crossed the distance between their chairs in a few strides. The hand he laid against Harry’s chest felt like a cross between a caress and a shove. “But don’t suffer needless pain for the sake of looking strong.”  
  
Harry nodded. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling at the moment, though curdled shame was part of it.   
  
And a small part of it was warmth. Draco _did_ care enough about him to notice when he was in pain, and to push him into doing something about it, the same way Harry had tried to ease the pain that both Draco and Scorpius suffered after Scorpius’s accident. Granted, he did it in a typically Draco way, but Harry still valued it.  
  
“Now,” Draco said, “you are going to bed, and I’m going to levitate you there. And then a pain potion to make you sleep, I think. The last thing you need is the leg keeping you up all night, which I think has happened at times. You often have a light on under your door.”  
  
Harry looked up, startled. “But I don’t want to get addicted to the pain potions, either,” he began.  
  
“You gave Scorpius a damn good lecture about coming off them,” Draco replied calmly. “I still remember that, and I’ll do the same thing if you _are_ addicted. But you’re going to stop worrying about imaginary fears and deal with what’s actually happening in front of you, Harry bloody Potter.”  
  
He pointed his wand at Harry, and Harry floated off the ground and towards his bedroom. Draco cupped one hand casually under Harry’s eye as he passed, rubbing a thumb along Harry’s cheek and all its ridges.  
  
It was the first time he had touched Harry like that without bracing himself and taking several heavy breaths first. And this time, to do it so _casually_ , turning away the next moment and barking for the house-elves as if he didn’t realize that he’d done something significant…  
  
Harry yawned as if more tired than he really was and closed his eyes, to hide the stinging wetness at the corners of them.  
  
*  
  
Draco stared down at Harry, now firmly asleep thanks to one of the pain potions from Draco’s own store (which Draco would have given him gladly all along if he’d only known that Harry’s suffering was this intense) and shook his head.  
  
He had thought it was stubbornness alone that drove Harry not to wear a glamour in public and to limp around on that leg instead of creating a floating vehicle for himself, the way that some rich wizards in the past had done. Now he understood that it also had to do with pride.  
  
And Draco knew what pride was like from the inside.   
  
He sat down in a chair next to Harry’s bed and stared at him broodingly. Scorpius was settled and asleep, the man Draco was in love with wasn’t going anywhere for the moment or basking in unrelieved pain, and Draco had time to think.  
  
He had felt his own chest constrict when he stepped into the library to fetch a book of bedtime stories for Scorpius and realized that Harry was bent over and wheezing with pain. And then his reasons had made no sense—  
  
Except that they did, if Draco looked back on their original relationship.  
  
Harry had wanted to show that he was good enough for Draco as well as Draco being good enough for him. He had tried politeness, even friendliness, with Draco’s parents until he realized it would never work. He had made an effort to befriend Draco’s friends and learn pure-blood customs, such as the proper way to celebrate important birthdays. He had released his magic in ways that might have made him uncomfortable if he was displaying before an audience, but with only Draco to see, he had done it because he knew it thrilled Draco.  
  
And if he thought Draco thought he was weak, of course he would keep up the pretense of stoic strength even after they had parted.  
  
“I never thought you were weak,” Draco told him. “You were the strong one, and that was why I was so afraid. Because you could be strong enough to live with what happened to you; I never doubted that. But I knew I couldn’t be, and I knew I’d fall short of you, and then you’d get bored of me and leave and find someone else better. Someone who was your equal.”  
  
Voicing the real reasons he had been so hostile to Harry’s lack of glamours years ago made him lean bonelessly against the back of the chair. Even then, he thought, part of him had recognized his obsession with beauty as a weakness. But _anything_ was better than Harry leaving him because he thought that way, including his leaving for other reasons.  
  
And Draco had thought he could never overcome that prejudice.  
  
 _And now?_  
  
Now, it was easier because he had seen that Harry had his own stupid prejudices.  
  
Draco brushed his fingers along his cheeks. He kept learning new things about himself, at such a pace that he would have suspected Harry had buried these revelations in his mind just so that he could learn about them, if it were possible to believe something like that. He had never known that he dreaded so much falling short of Harry’s expectations.   
  
_I struggled to be with him. I knew I wanted him. Why wasn’t that enough to make me sure that I would always be with him?_  
  
And it was possible that his own desire for and confidence in and envy of Harry had blinded him to the faults that were always there.  
  
Draco opened his eyes. Harry lay with _his_ closed, disguising the one feature that had previously made his face tolerable for Draco to look at. And he even lay with his head partially turned away, so that Draco couldn’t see the undamaged curve of his mouth.  
  
For the first time since Harry had told him the story, he thought, deliberately, of Fenrir Greyback reaching down, melting that flesh, gathering it up in his hands, and reshaping it.  
  
He felt a shiver run along his back, and this time, it was a shiver of grief and hatred and disgust. If Harry’s magic hadn’t torn the insane werewolf apart, then Draco would have had no choice but to finish the job himself, even if it meant breaking into Azkaban.  
  
 _The wonder isn’t that he looks the way he does, but that he has a face left at all._  
  
Draco’s hands tingled. He rubbed them together, wondering if that would ease the odd feeling. But they went on tingling, and Draco thought he knew what his flesh wanted—the one thing he would not have believed they could want only a few weeks ago.  
  
He inched a hand out, then stopped. And then he remembered that he had touched Harry’s face in the library earlier, and it hadn’t burned him, or dirtied him, or given him any strange diseases.  
  
He smiled—at his own fears or the way Harry had survived, he didn’t know—and reached out to lay his hand on Harry’s cheek.  
  
It was just skin, he thought. Hardened skin, yes; he would never stroke Harry’s cheek as easily as he had before his capture. But even if it flaked under his touch, it wasn’t a weapon. It couldn’t harm him. It wasn’t any more disgusting than Potions ingredients that he sometimes worked with on a daily basis.  
  
Then he imagined it distorted in another way, gray and rippled like elephant flesh, and a shudder ran down his spine.  
  
 _So I do still hate ugly things. But I’ve had time to get used to the way Harry looks, and so I think it’s—not so bad._  
  
Draco smiled again. Yes, he had changed, but not that much. He was still himself, and so he was still Harry’s equal in the way that mattered; neither of them was about to become a sacrifice for the sake of the other.  
  
Now his lips were tingling.  
  
Not giving himself time to think about what he was doing, Draco bent down and brushed his lips across the same ridge he had stroked a moment ago. The skin flexed under his lips, and Harry moaned and stirred. Draco sat back, fighting the urge to lick his lips, and instead gingerly touched them. No, nothing black and spiky had broken off on his mouth, or grown there.  
  
And now his groin was aching in a way that it hadn’t since he’d broken up with Harry, but that was his own fault, and he would simply have to soothe himself this evening. He wouldn’t wake Harry up for anything.  
  
He had kissed Harry. He had kissed the face he thought so ugly at first, but which he’d got used to.  
  
And survived.  
  
He couldn’t stop smiling, or wishing for a mirror. This was a _legitimate_ reason to be proud of himself.  
  
He touched his lips to Harry’s face once more, this time on the mouth, and then left for a rather urgent wanking session in his own room.  
  
*  
  
Harry glanced up from his book. Draco was sitting in the chair next to him, to all appearances attentively reading a tome of Healing spells. He had explained to Harry that they would, at the very least, find charms that would ease the ache in his leg for long periods without addicting him to the magic.  
  
But that was only what he was doing at the moment. All day, and the day before that, and the day before that, he had acted—very oddly.  
  
He brushed Harry’s shoulder when he didn’t have to. Sometimes he deliberately forced himself into narrow doorways or corridors at the same moment Harry entered them, so he would have an excuse to brush his body alongside Harry’s.   
  
He’d developed a habit of leaning close when he talked, even when they rowed about whether the Healing spells were advanced enough to handle Harry’s pain. That puzzled Harry in particular because Draco had always preferred some distance between himself and his opponent when he argued. But now—a constant leaning-in, a constant softness to his smile that made Harry think his anger wasn’t serious, and more unnecessary brushes of his hand against Harry’s arm.  
  
And then he had touched Harry’s arse when they entered the library.  
  
Harry knew what it looked like to him. He knew what he _wanted_ it to be. But it had only been a bit more than two months since he and Draco had made the decision to live together as well as they could, and he had thought it would take a few years for Draco to get over his prejudice.  
  
Just then, Draco looked up at him, ran his tongue along his lips in a slow and extremely lascivious manner, and winked. Then he looked down at his book and went on reading again as if nothing had happened.  
  
“Draco?” Harry asked, unable to keep the concern out of his voice. “Are you all right?”  
  
“Of course,” Draco said, glancing up again. There was genuine curiosity in his face and voice, and Harry wondered absurdly for a moment if Voldemort had come back to life, possessed Draco, and was manipulating him into acting as if he wanted to be Harry’s lover without Draco’s conscious knowledge. “I’m not the one attacked by dwarf magic or tortured by Death Eaters until it’s a miracle I’m alive. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”  
  
“You—er, you’re touching me all the time and you wink at me and you touched my arse earlier,” Harry mumbled.   
  
As Draco’s face refashioned itself in a scowl, Harry pressed against the back of his chair. _Shit, he meant something else and now he’ll be angry I misinterpreted his signals—_  
  
“It’s _called_ flirting,” Draco said. “Idiot.”  
  
“Er,” Harry said, and followed that up with the most intelligible word he could think of at the moment. “What?”  
  
Draco laid down his book carefully and leaned forwards. He resembled Scorpius more at that moment than Harry had ever seen him do. “You see,” he said in a mock-simple voice, “sometimes when one man wants another man very much, he might indicate that by touching him and making small gestures which are _sexual_ in nature.”  
  
“I know that,” Harry said. “But—I don’t know—“ He fought a battle with hope harder than any he’d fought in the last three years, and finally blurted out, “Do you really want me now? Or is this a pity fuck or something similar?”  
  
“If I pitied you,” Draco said lowly, “I would have stayed with you in the first place, because who could have brought themselves to leave someone suffering that much?”  
  
“You did.”  
  
“You left me,” Draco said, “but I’m not interested in semantics. I’m interested in a good, hard fucking. An intense lovemaking session. A few hours where all we do is spend time in bed with your cock in me. A—“  
  
Harry lunged to his feet and limped towards Draco. Draco stood up, his mouth half-open in a snarl, as if to say that Harry wasn’t about to catch him off-guard or sitting down.  
  
Harry bent down, watching Draco’s eyes all the while. He half-wanted to see a flinch, he had to admit to himself. That would give him an excuse to back down and away from a process that he feared would disappoint Draco, with the careful maneuvering that would be necessary to cushion his bad leg and give Draco some relief from his face.  
  
But instead Draco rose to meet him, and his eyes were defiantly open.  
  
And Harry sobbed in relief and acceptance, and desire he had given up being able to feel flooded him again.  
  
*  
  
Draco had forgotten what it was like to have a Gryffindor in his bed, or a man who really wanted to fuck him.  
  
So he thought at first, until Harry backed him up into the edge and then spent five minutes lying on top of him, licking Draco’s throat until he was writhing and arching his hips and begging under his breath.  
  
No, he had forgotten what it was like to have _Harry_ in his bed.  
  
Harry had never been perfect. He writhed around on top of Draco like a perfect demon of elbows. He got attached to one place—Draco’s neck, his nipples, the contours of his chest—and forgot to go anywhere else. He dazed Draco with his breath, his warmth, his hands that could sidle in unexpected directions and pinch and twist. He got Draco naked long before he thought to remove his own robes, never mind his shirt and trousers. And then he left his pants on for no apparent reason, unless he had remembered how much Draco liked the sight of his cock outlined against wet cloth.  
  
But he was always, undeniably _present_. He never let Draco forget what they were doing or get bored, although Draco was impatient, wild half the time for Harry to touch his cock and the other half for him to simply continue doing whatever he was doing at the moment. He scraped with his teeth and probed with his fingers and conjured lubricant wandlessly, the oil shimmering into place on his hand the same way that the metal rose and danced to his song. And he leaned back in the middle of a couch of cushions he’d conjured to cradle his bad leg and gave Draco a smile that made his tongue shrivel in his mouth.   
  
He tried to whimper when Harry slid a finger into his body, but couldn’t manage a credible sound.  
  
There was a feeling of fullness. Of course there was. And there was the moment when Harry, after fumbling for it the way he always did, finally located his prostate and rubbed it. Draco bucked up, his tongue loosening as he made a hoarse, indecent sound. Harry chuckled smugly. For some reason, he liked it when Draco made indecent sounds.  
  
All that, and more. Draco had never realized how much he could miss this, what his life was like when he didn’t have it.   
  
He reached up, snaked one hand through Harry’s hair, and pulled him down until that ruined mask of a face stooped above his. And yes, it was still a ruined mask of a face. Harry would never again look the way he had before his scarring. The more Draco read about Healing spells and the theory behind them, the more he understood why that had to be.  
  
But his _spirit_ burned as brightly as ever, and it was the spirit guiding the body that Draco wanted to make love to him, not the face.  
  
“ _Now_ ,” he said, and Harry smiled agreeably and shifted himself so that Draco—who lay flat on the bed so that Harry could achieve a comfortable kneeling posture with his bad leg—actually felt the touch of his cock against his entrance.  
  
“Now?” Harry asked, dragging himself up and down, until Draco’s skin grew slick with his come and the warm smell of them both filled the room and Draco drove himself backwards and sobbed with frustration. “Or now?”  
  
Draco babbled agreement, and Harry eased inside him.  
  
As always, he pushed too fast and then halted with a wordless murmur of apology at Draco’s pained gasp. But the expression of exultation on his face made it worth it.  
  
Not ecstasy, Draco thought, bucking himself onto Harry’s cock in a way that made Harry’s eyes flutter shut and his head tilt back. Harry never deigned to wear any look of simple physical pleasure. It had to be exultation or exhilaration, supreme _joy_ , or it was too mundane an expression for him.  
  
And Draco realized, dimly, that he had learned to read expressions on Harry’s face, rough, ridged skin and all.  
  
Harry gave a shout and began to push. His movements had changed, a bit; they were more restricted than Draco remembered, because of the necessity not to interrupt the lovemaking with a blinding cry of pain. But he had learned something about finesse—Draco would not ask who had taught him—and located Draco’s prostate in three thrusts instead of ten.   
  
And his hand had crept back to Draco’s cock, and he had opened his eyes and was staring down, as greedy of Draco’s pleasure as always.  
  
Draco’s stomach quivered. His body rocked, surged, shoved, rose and fell. He never remembered this much exertion—sweat spangled his forehead and his chest—or this much sheer determination to chase down an orgasm or die trying.  
  
Up, down. The room blurred. Directions blurred. Everything blurred but the sight of Harry’s face above him and the feel of his cock inside Draco and the coaxing tug of his hand around Draco’s erection.   
  
Streaks of cloudy flame embraced Draco as they had his son when the dwarf healed him. Unlike Scorpius, he descended into the midst of the racing fire and rejoiced through it, until the moment—fleeting, always fleeting—surged past and left him behind, panting, in the middle of the bed.  
  
He opened his eyes. Harry was shaking above him, fallen forwards so that his hands gripped the bed on either side of Draco’s shoulders, his eyes open and his mouth devouring the air as he spent himself inside Draco’s body.  
  
Draco waited, patiently, for Harry to return from his own climax, and then reached a hand up and stroked his face, deliberately, down from his left eye to his left cheek and his neck.  
  
Harry opened his eyes. “I _love_ you,” he said, with the force of someone declaring a religious conversion.  
  
Draco kissed him under the ear by way of answer.   
  
*  
  
Harry opened his eyes slowly. He knew that he lay in bed with Draco—and that was a revelation in itself that made him want to lie still and bask in the amazingness—and he knew he was warm and content and didn’t have a full bladder, but still, something had woken him up.  
  
He turned his head slowly. He saw Draco, flat on his back with one arm flung over Harry’s chest, his mouth open and his snore fluttering a strand of blond hair above his mouth. He saw the glittering green curtains on Draco’s window, the soft but rumpled and sticky sheets of the bed, the open door.   
  
He saw Scorpius standing at the edge of the bed, blinking at them in frank awe, his thumb in his mouth. His other hand was open, and on his palm perched a small figure with wings, which stared at Harry in a hostile manner.  
  
“You _stink_ ,” said Scorpius. That dispensed with, he held up his hand. “Look what Ginny sent me! It’s a doxie. It flies really fast and bites a lot and lays lots of eggs.”  
  
Harry cleared his throat gingerly. He didn’t mind Scorpius’s intrusion, but he didn’t think Draco would want his son seeing the residue of their sex. And besides, Scorpius might not mean his words literally. “Scorpius? Are you—upset?”  
  
“You made lots of noise and kept me up,” said Scorpius. “That’s all. And now you stink. You should go take a shower.” He paused. “ _After_ Lucy gets to know you,” he said, and flung the doxie at Harry.  
  
It bit him on the nose with great force. Then it flew back to Scorpius, and they ran madly out of the room together, as Harry shouted and clapped a hand to his nose, and Draco demanded sleepily to know what was going on.  
  
O _ur son just found us sleeping together and ran off to cause trouble_ , Harry thought, turning to look at Draco. Draco was blinking at him, displeased on the surface, but with a shy, determined smile that curved his lips the moment he looked at Harry. He wasn’t past all his prejudices, but he was getting there.  
  
“I do love you,” Draco said, half-laughing, “but I wish you would tell me why you’ve got such a silly expression on your face.”  
  
“In other words,” Harry whispered as he bent down to kiss Draco, “a normal morning.”  
  
 **End.**


End file.
